Established as a top-secret site for development of the atomic bomb as part of World War II's Manhattan Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has, from its very beginnings, hosted some of the world's most brilliant scientists. Many of them were recipients of the internationally famous award for scientific accomplishment, the Nobel Prize.
In Nobel Laureates of Los Alamos: The Manhattan Project Era, editors Rizwan Ali, who directs the National Security Research Center at Los Alamos, and Brye Ann Steeves have, with the assistance of a talented team of writers and designers, assembled portraits of the visionary researchers whose names are indelibly engraved in the popular imagination: Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and others. But these are not merely sketches of great intellects. Among the Nobel laureates profiled here we also find a sly practical joker, an avid fly fisherman, an inward-focused beachcomber, a spontaneous comedian, and a gifted singer, along with the Lab's wartime leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was never a Nobel Prize recipient himself.
During the early years at Los Alamos—under the shroud of secrecy imposed by the dictates of the Manhattan Project—these scientists lived, labored, debated, explored the limits of human knowledge, and collectively laid the foundation for not only the development of the nuclear age, but of vast swaths of science and technology during the twentieth century. Offered in a lively, visually rich and easy-to-read presentation, this book provides a three-dimensional recollection of some of the most important scientific pioneers of the modern age.
