From Berkeley to Trinity via Manhattan: Lecture and Q&A with Eric B. Norman

UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering professor Eric B. Norman will give a talk titled "Oppenheimer – From Berkeley to Trinity via Manhattan" as part of the College of Engineering's On the Same Page fall program about Oppenheimer.

Robert Oppenheimer successfully directed the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapons. However, two other Berkeley faculty members played crucial roles in this development. Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron enabled Glenn Seaborg to discover plutonium and led to the development of uranium isotopic enrichment. In this talk Norman will describe this work and his group’s investigations to authenticate the first sample of plutonium that was large enough to be weighed and to determine the explosive yield of the “Gadget” through studies of trinitite.

The lecture will take place Tuesday, October 8th from 12:00 - 1:00PM in Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall.

Register here to attend.