Rocky Kolb is an opera buff, so one of the things we talked about during our recent breakfast was the upcoming production of Doctor Atomic in Chicago. When this opera about the Manhattan Project had its world premier in 2005, San Francisco Opera asked us to create a Website exploring the science and historical context behind the development of the atomic bomb. The Exploratoirum has its part of the story, our founder Frank Oppenheimer worked on the Manhattan Project with his brother, J. Robert, who was its scientific director. Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, helped us with the history and I traveled with Exploratorium artist Susan Schwartzenberg to Los Alamos, New Mexico to mine the archives there for photographs and clues about what it was like for the scientists and their families to live and work in the desert isolation. With Doctor Atomic opening in Chicago Rocky would like to highlight the University of Chicago’s role in the story. There’s a lot to work with: one of the primary characters in the opera is Enrico Fermi who spent much of his career at the University of Chicago. He provided the proof on concept for a nuclear chain reaction by building the famous pile on a squash court at Chicago.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under exploratorium, nobel prize, science celebrities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.