I generally love reading a mixture of nonfiction alongside my fictional exploits: a mix of science, history, or psychology is usually my go-to. This time, I got a bit of all of it with science, military history, and philosophical conundrums with The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I thought I was just going to get some of the uncovered documents from the Manhattan Project, as they were developing what was revolutionary technology. Instead, I got science lessons that I partially forgot. Instead of just discussing the making of the bomb, we discussed the scientific progress that led to that initial thought process. I was reading about chemical and physical theories I was pretty sure I threw into the dumpster of tests past. It is also weird learning about these scientific concepts in a historical aspect, as it seems that all these people personally knew or knew of each other: Bohr, the Curies, Fermi, and Einstein were connected and conversing with and about each other.
Overall, the book was a fantastic delve into the science of all the work that was necessary for the making of this bomb, along with some of the political exploits. As a scientist myself, it was interesting to see that science was not in a vacuum as I like to think of it; science itself was being shaped by the world around, for better or for worse. In fact, it is a deep book that does need some background knowledge of chemistry and physics to understand the intricacies, as Rhodes does not hold your hand; he throws you right in the deep end. I did end up skimming parts of the last chapter because that is where the “after” is described, and some of the descriptions from the people on site were horrific and stomach-turning. Again, science, unfortunately, does not happen in a vacuum.
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