The real science of the nuclear age: behind Oppenheimer - with Frank Close
Frank Close takes us on a journey through the potentially devastating science and history of the nuclear age.Join this channel to get access to perks:
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Watch the Q&A here (exclusively for our Science Supporters): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpQDBb4XcCA
Buy Frank's book 'Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965' here: https://geni.us/mSIn37u
This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 12 July 2025.
Could the atomic energy contained in a gram of radium really drive a ship across the Atlantic? Did a traffic light near the Royal Institution really give Leo Szilard his idea of the chain reaction? And was Oppenheimer really the “father of the atomic bomb”?
Ri favourite, and former Christmas Lecturer Frank Close explains how an accidental discovery of a faint smudge on a photographic plate made by physicist Henry Becquerel in 1896 sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age, and reveals some of the myths that have grown around this saga.
Discover the story of how pursuit of this hidden nuclear power source, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.
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Frank Close is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. He was one time head of theory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and head of communications and public education at CERN. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of their Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013, and gave the 1993 CHRISTMAS LECTURES at the Ri. He is the only professional scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers Prize on 3 occasions. Frank is the author of 22 books on science including The Cosmic Onion, Trinity, and Elusive - the story of the elusive Peter Higgs and his boson.
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