Enlarge / In 1953, the eminent physicist and H-bomb advocate took an ill-fated in a single day prepare from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, that will not directly result in the Robert Oppenheimer safety listening to. (credit score: Michail_Petrov-96/iStock/Getty Photos)
Within the common science world, physicist John Wheeler might be finest recognized for popularizing the time period “black gap,” though his analysis spanned a broad vary of fields, together with relativity, quantum principle, and nuclear fission. He additionally labored on Challenge Matterhorn B within the early 1950s, the controversial US effort to develop a hydrogen bomb. In January 1953, Wheeler unintentionally left a extremely categorized doc regarding that program on a prepare as he traveled from his Princeton, New Jersey residence to Washington, DC. It was a stereotypical “absent-minded professor” second, and one with important nationwide safety implications.
Alex Wellerstein informed the story intimately late final yr in an article in Physics As we speak. Wellerstein is a historian of science on the Stevens Institute of Know-how in New Jersey, the place his analysis facilities on the historical past of nuclear weapons and nuclear historical past. (Enjoyable reality: he served as a historic marketing consultant on the short-lived TV sequence, Manhattan.) His forthcoming ebook, Restricted Information: The Historical past of Nuclear Secrecy in america, is slated for publication in April 2021 by the College of Chicago Press.
A self-described “devoted archive rat,” Wellerstein maintains a number of home made databases to maintain observe of all of the digitized information he is accrued through the years from official, personal, and private archives. The bits that do not discover their manner into educational papers usually find yourself as objects on his weblog, Restricted Information, the place he additionally maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive device that allows customers to mannequin the affect of quite a few forms of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their selection.
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