YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Close

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-08-05
most recent: 2025-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of knowledge that you can't control what is done with it, it's a zero sum game in that sense. the energy that has been locked inside atoms since the start of time is a wonderful resource and if we cannot find a way of using that for good I think it's a total failure of humanity. If there is any purpose to existence and what we're trying to do here, I think discovering that atoms contain energy frozen in and we can liberate it and make use of it That, I think, is probably what the nature it all could be about. And on the 16th of July 1945, they discovered how to liberate it explosively, meaning that from that day on, you could liberate it at whatever speed you wanted under control forms in order to create energy for society, but also in uncontrolled forms. And the challenge really is a moral one and a political one, not a scientific one.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is that the atomic bomb explosion, as well as creating devastation, would create a temperature of about a million degrees. So the heat liberated in the atomic explosion could be the spark to set off a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb explosion. And that is why today atomic bombs are the triggers for this more garbage device. Now Edward Teller had a design of what he called a backyard weapon, a hydrogen bomb that was so big that there would be no need to move it from the construction site because it could literally kill absolutely everything on the planet. I mean, you might ask why would you ever want to do that? And it's a fair question, and I don't have an answer to it, but it is absolutely awful. But that is the nature.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limitations are only how much hydrogen you can accumulate and ignite and keep burning. I mean, the sun in the sky is an example of a hydrogen fusion reaction going on, but it's been going on slowly for 5,000 million years. The question is, is it possible in principle to speed that up so that the sunburnt in a thousandth of a second? And that is what the challenge, if you like, of the hydrogen bomb was. So what's the hydrogen bomb got to do with the atomic bomb? Well, the sun is very, very hot. To make the hydrogen explode, you've got to fuse, bring together all those atoms of hydrogen against the electrical forces that are trying to keep them apart. And the way that you do that is to have incredibly high temperatures. The center of the sun is 10 million degrees, for example. Enrico Fermi had had the insight, and Edward Teller, who starred in Oppenheimer, became obsessed with...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Atomic bomb, ghastly though it is, is limited in the extent of the damage it can do because one thing that makes it happen is what's called the critical mass. If you've got a lump of uranium that is smaller than a few kilograms, it's completely harmless. It's only when you bring two of them together to make a lump that is bigger than the critical amount that the explosion can happen. So you've set your atomic bomb off. The explosion happens in a thousandth of a second and a thousandth of a second later, it's gone into smaller bits, which can no longer continue exploding. So the explosion is over in a thousandth of a second and it is limited to, well, maybe four or five times bigger than was actually dropped on Hiroshima. Horrible, but nonetheless limited. Now, the hydrogen Bomb has no limit.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deals with, and that may be what's behind your question, is that the atomic bomb today is actually nothing more than the spark that ignites hydrogen bonds, which are awful. The qualitatively totally different.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's only later does it fully dawn precisely what the implications of this are going to be? And that is where Niels Bohr, I think, was very important, being the older man of wise person. I think he had seen that before many people did. Again, it may be obvious after the event, you think, well, surely they realized, well, looking from today, given what we know, the results of those explosions over cities in Japan was, maybe you think the answer ought to be yes, but none of that moment. Not so. And so the horrible reality of the atomic bomb, what it could do, had dawned. The thing, however, which we haven't discussed and which the latter half of the book”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. So many questions there to consider because so much has changed. I try to imagine myself having been there when the first atomic explosion was tested in the New Mexico desert because Oppenheimer did show the movie the movie did show that very well the flash of a detonation 10 20 miles away is seen instantly. And then the sound, the shockwave is traveling at the speed of sound and it takes half a minute to arrive. And in that half minute the scientists have seen for the first time ever the total energy that has been trapped in those atoms for four and a half thousand million years released in an instant. And the magnitude of it is beyond anything that any of them wildly imagined. For scientists, that was a remarkably exciting moment. It's Promethean in its way.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Radiation standards of radiation monitoring, how much radiation you can safely experience and so on and so forth, all many things that we take for granted today are traced back to him and his team back then. He also was a founder of Pugwash, the scientific movement against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for that endeavor. He lived into his 90s and I have little pen portraits of like what happened next to the many people in the story, too many to mention in this podcast. And Rob Blatz is the final one because I point out that he lived his 90s. He won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he never remarried.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To travel, but she would come along in another week or ten days. So Joe Rockblatt returns to Liverpool. She has the tickets to follow him in a week or two, but the next day, the Nazis invade Poland and she was one many millions who ended up in the Holocaust. He never saw her again. And this induced in him an absolute hatred of the Nazis, and he was also an avowed pacifist. He became a key member of the British delegation in the Manhattan Project, but for him there was only one role there, and that was to defeat Germany. And the moment the Germans were defeated, there was no longer any moral case in his mind to continue developing these weapons. And so he quit. He returned to the UK, became a professor of nuclear physics in a London hospital. And it is he that developed many of the modern understandings of how radiation affects bodily tissue, the radio.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now there was no purpose from May onwards to continue developing an atomic bomb to defeat Germany. They had already been defeated. The quest continued, however, of course, and it was used against Japan. But where does Rotblack fit into this? Well, Rotblas came from Warsaw. He was Jewish. And when fishing was discovered, he wanted to investigate it himself in Warsaw, and that involved making a small accelerator. And to do that, he came across to England, to the University of Liverpool to learn how to do that. And he'd recently got married. He couldn't bring his wife with him. He couldn't have enough money. But he impressed the people in Liverpool so much, they doubled his salary, enabling him to go back to Warsaw to bring his wife back with him. Sadly, I mean, we're now talking end of August 1939, and his wife had just had appendicitis. She was recovering from that. She wasn't fit enough.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw it all. There are many interesting characters who are in there who play different roles. One who many people perhaps have not heard of is a man called Joe Rotblat, who for many me in particular is a hero of this. He's the only person in the scientific community that we know of who quit the program when its purpose was no longer raven. What I mean by that is this, that the purpose of building that bomb initially was to get it before the Nazis did in Germany. Now you realize, I mean, we are making this recording at the end of July in 2025. Just rock back 80 years to 1945. The atomic bomb was tested just a week ago, July the 16th. It will be used in a couple of weeks' time over Japan. Germans were defeated back in May.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Political and social implications of what this was all going to lead to. Oppenheimer is often described as the father of the atomic bomb. I think that that is actually a misnomer. I describe him in the book as the midwife. The point being that the father or the fathers were piles and fris in 1940 who had the insight as to what you have to do in order to make the thing explode the realization of that requires this huge program and Oppenheimer directs the science of this successfully and enables this whole concept to come into being with a gestation time of two years or so. So it's in that sense that Oppenheimer for me is the midwife who oversees”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the international nature of the work at Los Alamos in particular, I mean, you mentioned Niels Bohr, it's interesting to realize that the average age of the people working on the Manhattan Project was 29. Now, we all know many of these people later in life, very famous senior people, Nobel Prizes and so forth, but we forget it was way back when they were doing this. It was graduate students and young postdocs. The average age of 29 doing all of this research, Niels Bohr at 59 was the oldest person in the whole program. And he came in, we was brought in, I think, as the father of atomic physics in any ways to inspire. He was also quite philosophical and he saw what the implications could be post-war. And he was very much involved in trying to make people aware of the”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Project was several hundred thousand. We've got very far away from two people working on a benchtop, let alone a group of people with an atom smasher in a gymnasium. So the nature of the science and technology has completely altered. And it's in that context, I say, if the necessity of war had not been there, would you ever have had such an enterprise developed? And I can't see any reason why you would.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To develop the atomic, well, there were two. There's a bomb of uranium which was dropped over Hiroshima and a bomb of plutonium, which was dropped over Nagasaki. But the development of those two weapons took a couple of years and it involves almost the whole of the industrial might of the United States to achieve it. There was the laboratory at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which was enriching uranium. Over in the northwest in Washington state at Hamford, there was a huge reactor that was breeding plutonium, one atom at a time until you got enough to make a plutonium weapon. Work on metallurgy of how you'd actually make these bombs out of this stuff once you've got it, went on in Chicago. And the whole lot was put together, of course, at Los Alamos in New Mexico. And the total number of people involved in the Manhattan.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was the first that in America anybody had heard of this, that the Americans had realized, of course, that fission can generate energy, but they were focusing on natural uranium, and they were imagining having tons of uranium to liberate energy in what we would now call a nuclear reactor, or possibly to have tons of the stuff delivered on a ship that you could make explode. That wouldn't be very practical. But the insight that you only needed a very small amount of uranium-235, so long as you could make it, and that you could deliver that on a single plane, that was absolutely astonishing. And that is the moment when the Manhattan Project, if you like, began. Now, it's easy to say if you can make it, but the actual technology to do so was all but impossible. And the, as we now know, the eventual program.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said earlier on how things are always very obvious after the event. He spent a lot of time trying to crack the puzzle and then it all becomes obvious. Piles and Frisch, the moment they had this discovery on the piece of paper, they thought this was so obvious had Hitler's scientists in Germany already discovered that themselves? And if so, were they already developing what became known as the atomic bomb? And that was the reason why the atomic bomb project suddenly started in such great secrecy in the United Kingdom. And it wasn't until the end of 1941, by which time now Pulse of America gets into the war with the invasion of Japan at Pearl Harbor, that Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, was desperate to get the United States involved. And he sent a group of scientists across to the states with a dowry of discoveries, including the details of radar and also this discovery that Frischen Piles had made.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two Jewish emigrates from Hitler, I mean, another of the great ironies that Hitler's persecution of the Jews created the very situation that got rid of many of the brilliant mines who ended up developing the weaponry that led to Hitler's downfall, two of whom being Rudolf Pyles and Otto Frisch working at Birmingham in England. And in 1940, they said, well, just a second, suppose somehow you could make a lump of pure uranium-235. How much would you need to make an explosion? And to their shock and horror, they realized that a kilogram would be about enough to liberate the equivalent of about 1,000 tons of dynamite, I think is how they described it. And it would liberate radiation, which itself would be lethal, and there'd be no means to defend against it other than to have a weapon like that yourself. Now, the thing that...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“atom of uranium-235 and makes it fission and liberates a couple of neutrons. But the chance that those two neutrons, both of them now find the one in 140 that they need to make the thing carry on, it is exceedingly small. So rocks don't explode, which gave the insight, however, that if somehow you could increase the amount of uranium-235, the word enrichment which you rightly used, then the possibility of liberating energy would be there. Now this, again, sounds very obvious today, but nobody, apart from two guys in Britain, realized the significance of this.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in the jargon. One called uranium-238 and the other 235. The 238 means that the total number of protons and neutrons is 238 and the 235 likewise the total number is 235. And Bohr realized from his insights about nuclear physics that if you've got an even number of neutrons and protons, they're more stable, relatively speaking, than if you've got an odd number, which meant that 235 is the one that is doing the fissioning and liberating the energy, potentially explosively. But two, three, five, it turns out, is very rare. It's only about one in every 140 atoms of natural uranium. So Bohr immediately points out that this is why the rocks aren't exploding, that maybe the cosmic ray or a neutron hits an”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what you've just covered is probably an hour or two in its own right. Let's sort of back one second. I mean, I imagine many of the people listening to this have seen the movie Oppenheimer, which has probably given them a completely artificial and distorted picture of what really happened in that, for a start, it gives the impression that the discovery of nuclear fission immediately led Oppenheimer to the insight that the possibility of having an explosion was there. Maybe yes, maybe no, but he was totally wrong because Niels Bohr, the great Danish theorist, made a very obvious point. If it's that easy to make uranium explode through nuclear fission, then why aren't the rocks of the Earth, which are full of uranium, not exploding all the time? And Bohr realized that there are two different varieties of uranium or isotopes.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uranium nucleus will wobble and break in two. And that is what it's called fission. And the act of breaking in two does two things. It releases, first of all, a vast amount of energy, a million times greater than anything that has been seen before atom for atom. But the other thing is that in addition to splitting the nucleus, a couple of neutrons get chipped off. And these neutrons can now repeat the fission by hitting two more uranium nuclei, liberating energy and splitting off now four neutrons. And so you get the possibility of what is called a chain reaction that very rapidly one to two to four to eight decision 32 like that in thousands of a second you get 40 generations of doublings and an explosive release of the nuclear energy and that Became one of the keys to the eventual development of the atomic bomb.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I do move along the way that, as we'll see, the development of the atomic bomb was such a vast project and almost impossible. But for the Second World War, there might well not have been the impetus to have even started that. And our picture of nuclear physics today would probably be much more that of Irene Curie developing the means to make nuclear isotopes that the medical people can use to save lives and do diagnostics with. And that is what his primary use is today. But it was through the 1930s that these insights were developing and then they come to the climax at the very end of 1938. January 39 with the discovery of nuclear fission, which is that when a neutron hits an atom of uranium, it doesn't have to hit it very strongly at all.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the sense of direction comes after the Solvay conference. It's after that conference that Fermi starts doing his experiments bombarding elements with neutrons and Irene Curie. That's Marie Curie's daughter starts doing similar experiments. And I actually do say in the book that everybody's heard of Mary Curie, but in my opinion, her daughter, Irene Curie, played a much bigger role in the development of nuclear science and many of the things we take for granted today because the results of her experiment in 1934-35, the ability to be able to induce radioactivity in atoms that previously weren't radioactive is the basis of what is used in modern pet scanning, positron emission tomography, a diagnostic in cancer treatment, and in radiology and so forth.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conference which brings all of the world players, when I say all of them, we're talking here about 40 people together is the Solvay conference held in Brussels in 1933. That is the first time that all people get together and compare notes. And in a sense, that is when the beginning of what I call real nucleophysics starts. I mean, up to this moment, I mean, let's just pause a second. 1896 is when a smudge has been found showing that energy comes from inside the atom. 1945 is the first ability to explosively liberate that energy. We were already at 1932. So 36 years have passed before we've got enough knowledge to be able to start fiddling around and manipulating atomic nuclei ourselves. And that is really...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took about being fired for one of them to make a hit at all. It was just so inefficient. But in principle, one was beginning to get there. But the point of me telling this is that the nature of science itself is changing because up to this moment you've had one person, maybe two people working with what they can cobble together on a bench top. Now you've got the beginnings of big science. I mean, the Atom smasher that Cockcroft and Walton made was big enough to go from the floor to the ceiling of a room, the side of a gymnasium, for example. So science was beginning to get bigger. And by the time, so we're now 1932, the neutron has been discovered. The structure of the nucleus has made a protons and neutrons is being needing to make sense. The possibility of being able to smash atoms by brute force and liberate energy is there. And the first really big comment.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“about to change because one thing is the desperate desire to be able to get inside the nucleus and see what it's made of. One approach, which is what Ernest Rutherford developed in Cambridge, was to do it by brute force. And he, with two assistants, Chadwick and Walton, developed what was called the first atom smasher by putting a lot of energy in to you start off with hydrogen, you strip the electrons from hydrogen giving you a beam of protons, you apply electric kicks so they're moving very...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've told the story, if you like, in terms of a few winners in this pomcast, but as you say, there are a lot of people involved. And it's worthwhile realizing that 1910, 1920s, the people doing this research, there were not many of them around the world, mostly in Europe, and they were working in isolation individually ones and twos. There was Hahn and Meitner in Germany, there was Enrico Fermi in a small group in Italy. There was several people in France and so on. And in those days, they didn't have the internet or even telephones to communicate. They would meet once in a while at a conference or they would write letters and send it by the old-fashioned pigeon mail and wait for the reply. So it was a very different world from one we have today. By 1932, things are”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that in a moment, but I'll just make one passing history comment that if Fermi in 1934 have realized that he had actually split the uranium nucleus in two, a phenomenon which wasn't finally understood until 1938-39, then the whole stages that eventually will lead to the atomic bomb would have been in place five years earlier. And the possibilities of its implication for World War that was looming are probably too awful to think about. But, you know, there's an alternative history for you. Thankfully, Fishing had not been discovered in 1934 and the abilities who develop atomic weapons didn't happen until later on in the Second World War.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of these elements would have been around, but Neptunium and Plutonium are so radioactive that they died out very rapidly. But uranium is the longest living element that we sort of have today. So Fermi irradiated uranium with neutrons, and he found some very strange phenomena he didn't understand. And from that, he inferred that he had created the first transuranic elements, neptunium and plutonium, which he might have done, but actually we now with hindsight suspect that what he had unwittingly done was initiate what became known as nuclear fission, the ability to split uranium in two, and for the first time released vast amounts of energy. And this will become the key to the whole development of the atomic bomb and more. So probably we need to sort of take a pause and come back.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When these neutrons hit the nuclei of, say, aluminium, something that's been sitting around doing not very much for billions of years, they could induce radioactivity in them. In other words, for the first time it was possible to liberate some of the energy that had been trapped inside atomic nuclei by irradiating them with neutrons naturally. The other thing that he did was that he irradiated uranium. Now uranium at number 92 is the heaviest naturally occurring element. There are, we now know, elements beyond uranium called transuranium, like Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are the outer planets. So Uranium, Neptunium and Plutonium are the elements that go on beyond uranium. The thing is that back when the Earth was formed,”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was directly discovered in experiments at Cambridge by James Chadwick and assistants to Rutherford. So we've got at Laser 1932 where a picture of the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons emerged. And so now we come to Enrico Fermi, who around 1934 decided to irradiate atomic nuclei with neutrons, his insight being that whereas alpha particles being positively charged got kicked out by the repulsion of the positively charged nucleus, neutrons being neutral wouldn't have any such problem. They could go right into the nucleus and disturb it and see what happened. And so that's what he did. He fired neutrons at elements right the way across the periodic table and discovered that sometimes”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So far so good, but they were also able to measure the relative weights or relative masses of atoms. And this was where the first surprise, which led to the breakthrough, came, and that was that helium, which has got two protons, was four times as massive as hydrogen. By the time he got up to uranium with 92 protons, it was about 240 times as massive as hydrogen. And so this gave Rutherford the insight that there must be not just positively charged protons, but also neutral protons or neutrons inside nuclei. Neutrons and protons have almost the same mass. The only difference between them being that the protons carry positive charge and the neutrons are neutral. And that was a theory until about 1932 when the neutron itself”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rutherford had the insight that the positively charged nucleus of hydrogen just consists of one particle, and he called it the proton, the positively charged proton. And from this came the insight that the nuclei of all elements consist of protons. The more protons you have, the more positive charge you have, the further at the perilic table of elements you go. So hydrogen has one, helium at number two has two. all the way up to you”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, probably to move towards Fermi, I should just sort of back up very slightly because by the end of the First World War, Rutherford had managed to infer that he learnt something about the atomic nucleus, that when these other particles hit atoms of hydrogen, which is the lightest atomic element of all, number one in the periodic table, they kicked positive charges out. Whereas before, the alpha particle, if you like, is like a rubber tennis ball and the nucleus is like a big solid football, so the tennis ball bounces off it but doesn't affect the football very much at all. Now it was the other way around. The other particles are like the football and the nucleus of hydrogen is like the tennis ball which recoils very fast.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he was from that, and a series of experiments that he deduced that the positive charge exists on what we call the nucleus. But the very nature of what he had done couldn't tell him anything about what the inside of the nucleus was, because all he was doing, if you like, was firing positively charged alphas, which got bounced back by the electrical shield that that nucleus had put up. So they knew that the nucleus was there, but they couldn't get inside it yet at least to see what it was made of.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“were left uninterrupted they would reach the moon in about a second so the fact that a thin sheet of gold leaf which is so thin you can actually probably look through it the fact that they could turn such a fast moving alpha particle literally around in its tracks was absolutely astonishing and rutherford said he was as if he would fired a 15 inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it bounced back and hit you And from that he inferred that the positive charge that was deflecting that alpha particle, the positive charges in the atom must be very compact on a very massive center so that 99,000 times out of 100,000 times the alpha particles went straight through because the atom is pretty empty but once in a hundred thousand they hit directly the positive charge in the middle and bounce straight back.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Analogy is a bit like you've got some object behind a screen, you're not allowed to look through the screen, but you can fire a high pressure hose of water at this object and then by seeing how the splashes come out, try to sort of back calculate as to what the shape and structure of the object that the water jet has hit. And that really is what Rutherford was doing. His jet was actually a beam of alpha particles. They bounced off the positive charges inside the atoms. And from the directions they bounced, he put together a picture of what the atom looked like. And it turns out that once in about 10,000 times an alpha particle would bounce right back from where it had come. Now that might not sound remarkable, except I'm telling you, these other particles are moving about one quarter of the speed of light. And if they...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Positively charged massive particles spontaneously from inside atoms. We now know what they are, but at the moment, at that time he didn't know what they were, but that didn't matter. He was going to use then as sort of bullets, the idea being that if he could direct these alpha particles at atoms of gold, for example, in a thin sheet of gold leaf, he could see how they reacted when they got there. The point being he was trying to find where the positive charge inside the atom lives. And the one thing he knew was, as we all learn from high school, that like charges repel. So the positively charged alpha particles that he was beaming in would be repelled by the positively charged stuff within the atoms. And his idea, I drew the...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The alphabet. The ability, of course, to do experiments looking inside atoms, as you sort of hinted, you can't directly look inside an atom. It's far too small. So you have to do things by inference. And this was where Ernest Rutherford in particular was a great genius. We're at a stage, you know, early in early 20th century when the experiments were being done by an individual, maybe two people working together on a benchtop, little more than that, using whatever they could find around in the laboratory to cobble together. So Rutherford, for example, he used, well, radioactivity he had identified comes in two forms, one of which is called alpha, which involved the emitting of”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's very hard. We look back and it's all obvious after the event. I mean, that science isn't fundamentally different than any activity like trying to solve a crossword puzzle or any other sort of thing. You hit your head against the wall trying to solve the problem. And then eventually when you find the answer, it's so obvious, you wonder why you didn't see it already. And then in hindsight, it's all very clear-cut. And often the story of the development of science is told as if it is a natural progression from A to Z. Whereas in practice you are almost literally operating in the dark a lot. And as I tried to bring out in Destroyer of Worlds, the reality is you go from A to B to E back to C, maybe to Q, then back to F and G until eventually you start keep working forward along.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you've got the positively charged, massive nuclear sun in the middle, that's the nucleus. And then you've got the planetary electrons whirling around remotely on the outside. And so that was the picture of the atom they had around 1910 to 20. Of course, this is the time when the First World War took place. And so things sort of came to a temporary halt. But the state of knowledge then was atoms have a structure. There's at the heart of the atom something which is the atomic nucleus. All they knew about the nucleus was that it was massive and had positive charge. But it was clear that the energy that was leaking out of atoms was coming from the atomic nucleus somehow. But still you are stuck with the problem of how are we going to speed it up? And to answer that, you're going to have to understand much more about atomic atoms.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Negative electric charge on those electrons that it could ignite about 50 thunderstorms. So the fact that we're able to have a conversation without frying and setting off lightning bolts is because there is inside every atom positive charge that perfectly balances the negative. And that inference was understood straight away and raised the question, so where is this positive charge? And the real breakthrough came in 1910, 1911 time, when Ernest Rutherford, by now back in the UK, working in Manchester, discovered that the positive charge in the atom is to be found deep in the heart of the atom, right at the centre on a massive compact, what became known as the nucleus. And the analogy, if you like, of the atom that was picked up at that sort of time was of a miniature solar system.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clue from left field, and that's what we have here because in 1897, at first, totally unrelated to this was the discovery by J.J. Thompson in Cambridge in England that of the electron, which is a particle that carries electric charge. It is the carrier of electricity we now know. And it exists inside all atoms. And that was the first indication that atoms are not the final layer in the cosmic onion, that there is a deeper level within atoms consisting of a particular of these negatively charged electrons. Now, the amount of charge on an individual electron is extremely small, but when you breathe in, you breathe in a million, million, million, million atoms of nitrogen and oxygen with every breath. And that turns out that you've breathe in enough.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's almost sort of obvious when one realizes that you've got this astonishing source of energy which has been radiating for four and a half thousand million years, which tells you straight away is doing it extremely slowly. And this was the catch, that there is a huge amount of energy in those atoms, but it's dribbling out so slowly that there's nothing very obvious that you can do with it. And that was pretty well where they were initially stuck. And until you could find some way of liberating the energy faster, there would be no practical usage of it. And so the real question was, so what's going on inside there? And if that was the end of the story, we'd be stuck. But as you know, in any good detective story, at the end of the first chapter to when you think, ah, where are we? Suddenly the rioter introduces a new...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was that he did a quantitative measurement of how much energy was being emitted? And when he met the Curies and they put all their comparisons together, they realized that radium in particular had been emitting this energy spontaneously ever since the Earth had been formed. the implications were huge. I mean, there's an often stated remark that if you had a kilogram of radium, the amount of energy that is locked in there is enough to be able to drive an ocean liner from the UK to New York. And that is indeed true if you're prepared to spend 100 years on the trip. And this, if you like, was the catch-22 of what they discovered.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Native country of Poland and radium. And radium was so radioactive that it would glow in the dark. So at this stage, you have found that radioactivity is not something unique to uranium. It's a natural phenomenon of nature. Then we've got Ernest Rutherford, who grew up in New Zealand, came across to Cambridge, then moved to Canada before coming back to the UK. He made two great discoveries. One was that as the radioactivity is happening, elements can change from one to another. And this was, if you like, what the alchemists had been trying to do for centuries. They wanted to make gold out of lead. Well, Rutherford didn't actually manage to do that, but he had produced radon gas when he'd been starting with other elements. But the big thing...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing is I sort of presenting this a bit like a detective story. You've got one clue that you've got this faint smudge on a sheet of paper. So what? I mean, what do you do with it? Where do you go from there? How do you start trying to find out what's going on? And the people who made the first inroads were Pierre and Marie Curie. Pierre Curie had devised a way of being able to measure the intensity of radiation. This is what led him and Mary to discover that when they took lumps of rock which contained uranium, the amount of radioactivity coming from the rock was bigger than they could explain by the uranium alone. And so then they did a lot of chemical analysis on the rock and discovered two elements that had never been seen before, polonium, which was named after Mary's”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“what became known as radioactivity, this ability of certain elements to be able to spontaneously liberate energy day after day, millennia after millennia, ever since they've been formed at the start of time.”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Front of a photographic plate, and indeed found that they fogged the plate, which, okay, big deal. But he wanted to do the experiment better. And so he set up an improved experiment. Unfortunately, we're now talking January, February in 1896 in Paris. It was very dark and overcast, bad weather day after day. And after about 10 days, he hadn't been able to energize his uranium salts, but he decided after having left them in a dark draw the whole time, he decided to expose them to the photographic plates anyway and to his astonishment discovered this very faint fogging of the plates. And this by total chance showed that uranium is emitting energy without prior stimulation. And that was the beginning of...”
2025-08-05 · Intelligence Squared · Was the Nuclear Bomb Inevitable? With Frank Close · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT