-...going to do is, you'll see this room switch over slightly,
and before we show ourselves here on the webcam,
I'm going to point out a few important features here.
So here shortly, you should see Rob and I pop up on screen.
So there we go. Hey, everybody.
-Hey. -How's it going?
There is a chat pod below us right here,
and in this chat pod
is where you're going to be typing questions
for us and for Steve Sheinkin, who's about to come on here.
And I will be looking at your questions
throughout this program and kind of jotting them down here,
and I'll use those for our Q&A session
here in a little bit for all of us,
so that'll come at the end of the program.
How we're going to basically do this today is,
we're going to invite Steve to come on first to share about,
of course, his books that you see on screen,
and specifically his book, "Bomb" telling that great,
fascinating story, and then after that,
Rob and I are going to pull apart bits and pieces of "Bomb,"
and we're going to actually talk about
certain sections of the work,
and we're going to show you some --
We're going to ask you poll questions about it.
We're going to show you some neat demonstrations
related to those concepts in the book.
And so it should be a lot of fun,
and if you have the book with you,
we'll reference specific pages
so you could even follow along with us,
so that's basically how it goes.
And now, I'm actually going to invite Steve,
if you want to switch on your mike
and your webcam so students can see you, too.
While you're doing that, I'm going to introduce you,
so you guys can, of course,
see the many books that Steve has written.
Oh, there we go. -Here.
-Hey, Steve. All right.
And it looks like we can hear you, too, which is good.
-I hear you. -I'm going to, of course,
introduce you first,
and then Rob and I will hide while you present, so.
But Steve has written many books for students your age out there,
and many award-winning books,
and so I actually pulled up your biography,
and there's so many awards,
I feel like I can't even name them all.
But three of Steve's books actually have been
National Book Award finalists,
including "Bomb," which we're talking about today.
And, in addition to that, there's also been
Newbery Honor Medals, including "Bomb," of course.
There's been a YASLA Award of Excellence in nonfiction books,
and the list goes on and on and on,
and you can see it's about so many different
topics in history,
and I caught one of your interviews where you were saying
that you were a recovering textbook writer,
which I'm sure you'll want to share that
with students out there,
and how you transitioned from textbooks to, of course,
writing these wonderful stories.
And as I said, Steve today will be profiling his
Newbery Honor book,
his National Book Award finalist book, "Bomb,"
which is a fascinating story of the race to build
and steal the atomic bomb.
Steve, I'm going to let you take it away.
Guys, you'll see us at the end of the program
when Steve is all done.
Thanks so much, Steve. -Okay.
Thank you for that very good intro.
And, yeah, what you heard right there was correct
about being a textbook writer.
I'm not going to talk about that, but I am sorry about it,
because I know I never liked those books
when I was in school, and I did that for years,
but the good thing that came out of it
was that I kept finding all these great stories
that I thought could make really good books
because when I was in school,
I used to think history was boring,
which it totally isn't, but it was just
because it was being taught as a list of names,
of dates, of facts.
So I started to think, "Well, what if we took
some of this stuff and made it into stories
instead of lists of things to memorize?",
and that's what I'm trying to do now,
and that's what these books are all about.
But I'm going to jump right in to talking about "Bomb,"
which is the one that we're here to talk about.
And so, let's get going here.
The first picture really is the idea.
I call it the idea because every time I start a book,
it always starts with an idea.
And again, like I'm saying, I want it to be a story,
not just a list of things to learn,
and so I think in terms of movies.
I had worked on movies for a while, too, in my 20s,
or a novel.
And so, of course, you need a hook.
You need something, and in this case, it was this character,
Theodore Hall, and even this picture.
I love this picture.
Now, when you look at it,
I can't see anyone nodding or not nodding,
but does it kind of look like a police photo?
You know what I mean, like a mug shot?
And that's what I first saw.
I saw this young guy in this kind of mugshot-looking picture,
but then I realized as I read a little more
that this was not a mugshot.
This was his I.D. badge,
so he would wear it right on his shirt,
and it was the I.D. badge for Los Alamos,
this top-secret lab in New Mexico
where American scientists
and their allies were trying to build an atomic bomb,
and I thought, "Wow. That is kind of amazing.
This guy looks kind of young to be building an atomic bomb,"
and he was.
He was only 18 years old, and I thought,
"That's an interesting way into this story,
an 18-year-old building a bomb."
And then I realized as I read more
because I'd never heard of this guy,
Theodore Hall, that not only was he a scientist,
he was also a spy.
He also became a spy and started stealing information
out of this top-secret lab,
and I thought, "Wow. That's it. An 18-year-old scientist-spy.
That's my guy," and that's when I decided to do this book,
but I had no idea at the time exactly how to organize it
or which stories would be in it and which wouldn't,
and that's what I'm going to talk about now
is kind of how I figured all that out.
I of course did a lot of reading.
This is what my office might look like,
although this is very neat.
Usually, my stuff is all over the place.
But I'll start just the same way you would for something
you were doing for school, go to the library,
and I'd get books, and of course do a lot of reading online
as well, old loose papers, things like,
but it starts usually with just a lot of books,
a big pile of books.
And so as I'm reading and taking notes,
that could go on for months,
but I started to see that there are really three
story lines in it,
and I wanted to kind of weave them together
the way movies or TV shows do,
where I got a couple stories going
and then kind of started mixing them,
cutting from one to the other
because I think that could make the story really fun to read,
and the first part was the scientists.
That's the obvious part,
and the scientists who discovered the science
that led to this race to build a bomb,
and it started in Germany, actually,
with these scientists who discovered fission,
which is something you might read about
more in a science class,
you'd think, maybe, than a history class.
But these scientists in Germany were doing experiments in a lab,
and they realized they could split an atom, a uranium atom,
which had been thought to be impossible.
Scientists knew about atoms, but they had always assumed
that they could never be split any further or any smaller,
and these scientists discovered, yes,
if you bombarded them with neutrons,
these tiny particles,
that it would split the nucleus of an atom, of the uranium atom,
and these are two of the scientists who figured it out,
and this is a really simple drawing that they made to try
and explain what was happening,
and of course, it's oversimplified,
but if you could picture the speeding neutron
hitting this nucleus of an atom,
they called it the liquid drop formula.
It would almost act like a liquid drop
and start to break apart, like in point two here,
and then would actually split,
forming two totally separate atoms at that point,
and in doing so, it would release a little bit of energy,
and this woman in the picture,
Lise Meitner, who was a great physicist, realized
and calculated very quickly that the energy released
by this splitting of one uranium atom,
which would be relatively small, really,
it would be enough to make a grain of sand jump,
say, like, that high, a couple inches,
which doesn't seem like much, but they realized pretty quickly
as they start thinking about this,
"Well, if one atom releases that much energy,
what if a clump of atoms?"
And it's all theoretical, so they were thinking,
"What if, you know, a ball of atoms, a clump like this --
Picture the size of a basketball or something --
And you got those together,
and if you could get a chain reaction
going where those atoms split within a fraction of a second,"
and they're all thinking, "This is theoretically possible.
That would be a huge explosion
because each atom splitting would give off a bit of energy.
All together, it would make a massive explosion,
much more powerful than TNT or any other kind of explosive."
And it was all just an interesting thing
to think about at the time.
Scientists weren't trying to make bombs or weapons,
but it happened in Germany just as Adolf Hitler
was starting World War II,
and beginning by invading Poland
and then much of the rest of Europe,
so just as he's taking over Europe
and really has his eyes on taking over the whole world,
this discovery is made in Germany,
and that's what makes it so significant.
So what if -- And you'd want to think about a dystopian,
a really scary what-if kind of scenario for the world --
What if Hitler had been the first
to get his hands on this new kind of bomb?
And that easily could have happened,
and that's what this story is all about.
So the news spread quickly among scientists.
Some of them -- I'm going to go back just for a second
and show Lise Meitner again.
A lot of the scientists in this very small community
of physicists in Europe were Jewish,
so they either fled from Germany
to escape the Nazis like Lise Meitner did,
and a lot of them came to the United States,
and that's where I'm going to go next
because when they came to the United States,
they brought this news.
They said, "Wow. These scientists,
we've discovered this new thing called fission.
You can split an atom, and it might lead
to the making of a new kind of bomb,
and the Germans are already working on it.
Hitler may get this bomb first,
so we've got to get serious about it,"
and that's where this picture comes in,
which I'm sure you'll recognize the white-haired guy
is Albert Einstein.
And he was one of the German scientists
who had fled from Europe,
and so the scientists who had come recently said,
"We need to get this news to the president,
President Franklin Roosevelt,
so that he starts trying to build a bomb first
so we can get it before the Germans do."
And that's what this picture is about.
They found Einstein's beach house.
He wasn't really keeping up on the latest in science,
but these younger scientists found him, told him the news.
He agreed it was very serious, and he wrote this famous letter,
which is what the picture is of here,
to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president, saying,
"We better get serious about building this bomb
because the Germans already have a head start on it,"
and that's what sparked what became known
as the Manhattan Project,
this effort by the Americans to try and build a bomb,
which is really at the heart of this story.
This is a really interesting drawing.
We don't have a actual photograph of this,
but one of the early experiments scientists in America
did was to build this -- They called it a pile.
It was really a really -- a nuclear reactor.
It was very much like what these days is in nuclear power plants,
which seems like a really primitive version of it,
but they were in Chicago,
and they needed to test this chain reaction idea,
and so scientists --
This is actually under the football stadium
at the University of Chicago in a squash court,
sort of like a racquetball court.
It was the best space they could find, and it was freezing.
They're in the middle of winter, but they built this pile of --
The black squares you see are graphite,
just like the material in pencil leads --
and inside them are slugs or kind of pieces of uranium,
and they wanted to get a bunch of uranium together,
and the graphite worked as what they called a moderator,
and it would slow down the reaction,
and they wanted to see if they could get a chain reaction,
if one atom splitting would lead to another splitting
and another and another and another.
Now, does it seem sort of crazy to do that
in the middle of Chicago?
A lot of people who knew about it --
Of course, it was top secret -- but some of the Army people
who knew about it thought it was crazy,
but the scientists said,
"No. It's fine. We know what we're doing,"
even though no one had ever tried anything like this before.
But they tried it.
They did know what they were doing.
They got the chain reaction going, but they were able to
keep it very, very slow, so it was nothing like a bomb.
It created enough power to light a light bulb, they said,
but it proved that it could work,
and it was time to move on to this kind of race
to figure out how to make this into a bomb.
And that's where this guy comes in.
This is Robert Oppenheimer,
who's really the main character in the book.
I'd say there are many characters,
but he's kind of at the heart of the story,
and I feel like a book needs a main character,
just like a novel or a movie or a TV show does,
and I think he's the perfect main character for this story
because he became the lead scientist in the American effort
to build the bomb,
and though it doesn't have to do with the race,
I kind of stepped back in time just to introduce him.
Here he is as a young kid.
He's the old -- He's sitting with his brother.
He's the older brother in this top picture.
And he was a super nerdy kid.
I always thought, like, his childhood story
is almost like a superhero origin story,
like a, you know, Spiderman kind of story.
He starts out as this nerdy kid.
Kids are making fun of him,
and then discovers he has this strange power.
That's kind of how his life went.
He was a super nerdy middle school kid in New York City.
Other kids made fun of him mercilessly because he was --
Actually, he was quite annoying about his intelligence.
He would go into school and brag about how smart he was.
Other kids eventually had to write a petition,
or they decided to do,
write a petition asking him to shut up, basically,
because he was just always answering everything
and telling the teacher they were wrong all the time,
and so he was not the most popular kid,
to put it mildly, but he grew out of that.
Here you see him in his, looks like his 20s.
He's a super skinny guy.
He's got this crazy, great head of hair,
and he discovered what I think kind of
is his power, his superpower, really,
which is his ability to do math and science,
and he became a physicist,
and this really becomes, you could argue, a real power
because he's the one at the heart of this effort
to unleash the power within the atoms.
But he's also just a strange guy,
and I tell this story right at the beginning
just because I just love to get to know characters,
just like you would do for a novel,
and this is an article about this early story.
Okay, this would make a great scene, I think.
He's a young professor at Berkeley, California,
and he goes out on a date.
So he's sitting -- This is the view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
He's sitting with his date in a car
overlooking the San Francisco Harbor.
It's a really beautiful view,
but he's not a normal sort of guy.
He gets out, and he says, he asks his date,
"Do you mind if I just get out and think about science
for a little while?",
and she thinks that's really strange, but, okay.
So he gets out and wanders around,
leaving her on the top of this mountain,
and he wanders around so long
that he finally realizes he's back at his apartment,
and sees his apartment, and goes home and goes to bed,
completely forgetting he's on a date.
And meanwhile, the woman on the top of the hill
flagged down a police officer,
and they start looking for his body thinking he had,
who knows, been murdered or disappeared,
and it became a story in the newspaper,
which is really embarrassing for him,
but it also kind of introduces the character,
that he's brilliant,
but he also can be pretty forgetful,
and a lot of his friends didn't think he was a good choice
to run this top-secret lab.
Here he is at his blackboard, constantly smoking up a storm
while writing these crazy formulas on the blackboard.
That's a really classic picture of Oppenheimer at work.
But here he is with Leslie Groves,
who was the Army general who was really in charge
of this top-secret project,
and the two of them couldn't have been more different.
Oppenheimer, this sophisticated guy
who's really into science and classical music and poetry,
and Groves was this loud, gruff, people said very obnoxious guy,
but very, very efficient, good at getting things done,
and they really got along well
because they had this same goal in mind,
which was to win this race to build the bomb.
And the first thing they did was pick a spot,
and here's Los Alamos in New Mexico,
and they wanted somewhere that was in the middle of nowhere
but that also had buildings,
so they could get to work right away,
and it actually had been a school,
a place called the Los Alamos Boy's School,
a boarding school,
and they were driving around in New Mexico
and found this boarding school,
and they saw the kids out playing,
and they said, "This is perfect. We could just use the buildings.
We'll just kick everybody out of here,"
and of course you think they'd told the students
why they were being sent home?
Not at all.
Even the people who ran the school didn't know.
The Army just took over. Scientists moved in.
They made these checkpoints and gates
and jumped in to start going to work.
And I love this picture of this woman on the bottom here,
is Dorothy McKibbin.
She was -- They called her the gatekeeper of Los Alamos,
and I like the picture because she looks all innocent,
but they wanted that.
They wanted to set up an operation
that looked like nothing really important was going on,
so they picked this street in Santa Fe
and just took this little tiny office
that didn't look very fancy at all,
and she worked inside it, and if people showed up
wondering what they were doing there, she said,
"Oh, nothing important.
We don't have any jobs or anything like that,"
but if you came and you knew
because you had been recruited into this project,
you had the right credentials,
then she would give you your badge and tell you where to go,
and you would go up to the hill, they called it.
No one would ever say the secret lab in Los Alamos.
They always called it the hill.
And so here's Oppenheimer. He's got his hair cut.
He's got his badge, and heading up to the hill
to start work on this project.
And of course, you could guess the reason they went
to all these steps to be so secret
and careful was to keep out spies,
and that's the second part of the project.
As the scientists are working,
the spies are also getting started,
and this map helps to explain it.
This is kind of what the world,
really what the world looked like
as the U.S. really got into World War II,
so I would say early 1942,
and you see the U.S. and their allies in blue,
and you see the Axis Powers, Germany, Japan,
Italy in black, and the territory
that they had taken over since the start of the war,
and then the red is the Soviet Union, the Russians.
And they're kind of a special case
because they started with --
Before the war, they made a secret pact with Hitler
to not fight each other,
and then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union
and started, as you can see in this picture,
taking over big chunks of Soviet territory,
so now, the Soviets are fighting Hitler,
and so they're sort of our allies.
They were really our allies technically in World War II
with Britain and the United States,
but we really didn't trust each other,
and we didn't expect to be allies after the war,
and that's pretty important to the story
because we decided, the Americans,
that we were not going to share our secrets
about making nuclear bombs with the Russians
because we know that after the war,
we're going to be rivals again,
and we don't want them to know how we did it,
so they decided to steal it from us,
and that's what this part of the story is about.
This guy was a key to this effort,
Klaus Fuchs, and on this side, on the right side of the screen,
you can see his Los Alamos badge.
He was German, but he hated the Nazis.
He hated Hitler.
He was a Communist, really hardcore Communist,
and so Nazis hated the Communists.
They beat him up, even tried to kill him,
threw him in a river, but he escaped from Germany.
He came to the U.S. and was recruited into this project
because he was such a brilliant physicist.
Nobody worried too much about his politics,
and so he became a scientist at Los Alamos
and started doing really important work
there helping to build the bomb,
but as he later said, "I divided my brain in two.
I was a great scientist helping the U.S. build a bomb,
but I was also a devoted Communist,
so I made secret copies of everything
that we were figuring out there at the lab
and figured out a way to give them to the Soviet Union,
to the Russians during the war,"
and that was something that he was committed to,
and nobody had any idea.
People who later found out said, "He's the perfect spy."
He was because nobody suspected him.
I mean, does he look like James Bond to you?
Everyone thought he was --
And he really was a nice guy in his own way.
He was very, very shy, very quiet.
In fact, if the scientists wanted to drive down to Santa Fe
to go out to dinner --
A lot of scientists brought families to Los Alamos.
There was really nowhere to go out around there,
so say you brought your kids to live with you in Los Alamos
and you wanted to go out to dinner, you needed a babysitter.
He was the babysitter of choice,
everyone said, at Los Alamos because he was so friendly.
He would come over and play with the kids and play --
He brought his violin and he would play music,
and everyone loved him, and he was just --
He really was that guy,
but he was also this hardcore spy at the same time.
And this is his courier.
Again, not a movie spy.
He does not look like he belongs in a Hollywood spy movie, right?
But this is Harry Gold, and he was a courier.
If you ever want to be a spy, which I don't totally recommend,
you might get this job of being a courier,
especially in the day way before Internet or anything.
Everything is delivered by hand, so he would get the job.
Russian agents would contact him,
and he would get the job of going out to New Mexico.
He lived in Philadelphia with his parents, of all things.
Can you imagine being a spy and living with your mom and dad?
It kind of ruins the whole coolness factor,
but he would get these jobs, which he hated doing, by the way
because he was kind of in over his head at this point,
and the Russian agents would say,
"You have to do this, or we'll kill you,"
basically, so he would go out to New Mexico
and pick up an envelope with bomb plans.
He didn't know what was in it.
He wasn't supposed to even look at it,
but they would send him out,
so he'd pick up an envelope from Klaus Fuchs,
bring it back and hand it to a Russian agent,
and from there will take it.
And from there, they were able to get the information
from New York, where he came back to,
across to Moscow, in the Soviet Union,
and the Russians were able to start
trying to build a bomb with that information.
And Ted Hall, our original spy, the guy who gave me this idea,
was doing the exact same thing.
Hall didn't know that Fuchs was doing it, and vice-a-versa,
but they were both doing the same thing.
He was making secret plans, copies of the plans,
and he also had a courier, and he would make the copies.
And by the way, this is photocopy here
that says "Unclassified,"
these are the plans of how to make an atomic bomb.
Now, does it seem like that shouldn't be public information,
or maybe shouldn't be on the Internet?
But it is.
If you go later to, just to the web and type
in Los Alamos primer,
you'll get this PDF document
that is the plans of making the atomic bomb,
and this is what scientists showed.
Say you showed up at Los Alamos in the middle of the project,
scientists would show you this and say, "Read this.
This is what we're working on,"
and it all turned out to be correct,
and it worked, as we know now.
And the scientists will say, "Ah, it's such old information.
It doesn't matter if it's out there,
so, especially if you've taken
some math and physics classes, you should read this
and see if you can figure out what they're talking about.
But Hall had a courier, too. Her name was Lona Cohen,
a really serious Communist from New York,
and she would take the bus out, which took days, from New York,
show up at the University of New Mexico
where they had some prearranged spot.
He would give her an, again, an envelope,
and then she had the very dangerous job
of taking it back across the country.
She was often searched and had to hide his envelope,
which, if found and looked at,
it certainly would have led to her execution.
She knew that.
She would have been killed if she were caught stealing
and transporting these documents.
And then the third part of this story, I call it the commandos.
You have the scientist spies,
and then the commandos because all along, remember,
the Germans are trying to build their bomb,
and so this part of this story is about all the secret efforts
to disrupt and destroy their attempt,
the German attempt to build the bomb,
and a lot of it was done by secret agents and commandos
behind enemy lines, and it was very much --
And I know it's way before your time,
but do you know about the "Indiana Jones" movies?
I loved those when they came out,
and my kids liked them, too, so I think they hold up.
But they're -- You know that format
where it's nonstop action, adventure, chase scenes.
That's what this part of the story is all about.
A lot of these guys were Norwegians.
The Germans took over Norway just like they took over
so much of Europe,
and these young guys saw the Nazis take over their country.
They were furious and determined to do anything to fight back,
to take back their country and to fight back against Hitler,
and so a small group of them agreed
to be trained as commandos in Britain
and then agreed to take on these incredibly dangerous missions
where they would fly in a plane
and be dropped behind enemy lines with a parachute
and given these missions, and they were told flat-out,
"There's very little chance you're ever going to get back,"
but they took these missions anyway, and I love this picture
because it shows them on cross-country skis,
which is essential to getting around in certain parts
of Northern Europe in the winter,
and these guys were perfect
because they had all grown up in Norway,
and they all grew up on cross-country skis.
And so one of the missions that I highlight is this factory.
They were dropped in, in the middle of the night with skis
and a backpack full of bombs,
and they were told to blow up a lab inside this factory
that the Germans were using to make heavy water,
which was something that they were using in their experiments
and in their attempts to build an atomic bomb.
And the commandos didn't really understand the science of it,
but they didn't have to.
They just were told, "Here's the location.
It's very hard to get to.
It's going to be even harder to get away from,
but you need to get there, get into the basement,
blow up the lab and then,
if you can get away, that's a bonus."
And that's what this part of the story is about,
and a lot of people tell me
this is the most exciting part of the story.
I understand why, too, because I sort of agree.
It's the kind of thing I never, ever learned about
when I was studying World War II
when I was in middle school or high school.
They were also told to blow up this ferry boat,
which was carrying materials that the Germans were using
for their bomb research
back to Germany, and this became a really --
This is a really interesting kind of moral dilemma
because they knew --
The commandos knew that there would be civilians,
Norwegian civilians onboard this boat,
yet they were told to blow it up and sink it
in the deepest part of the lake, so what do you do?
And this was another one of the missions that they were given
and that make up this third part of the story,
and the other kind of part of this story, too, is ours
and Allied attempts to get at German scientists
because we were desperate to know what they were doing
and to stop them in any way, and the two parts --
The two guys on this slide are Morris "Moe" Berg.
He really was a baseball player in the '20s and '30s.
As you can see, he was a catcher,
but during World War II, he became a secret agent,
and I love telling his story because, again,
it's one of those scenes that sounds like
it's straight out of a spy movie or something.
He was given this, well --
The other picture here is Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg,
who was this great German physicist,
and the Allies knew he was still in Germany,
probably working on an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler,
so imagine getting this assignment.
Imagine you're Moe Berg getting this assignment.
They told him -- He was really good at languages,
and he had become --
You know, he'd long since retired from baseball,
and he'd become this secret agent,
but he didn't expect to get a job like this.
They told him, "We really want to get to Heisenberg,
but when he's in Germany, we can't get at him,
but we just found out he's going to be in Switzerland
for just a couple of days going a talk.
Switzerland is this neutral country right next to Germany.
We're not supposed to be, you know,
doing any sort of secret missions there,
but let's worry about the fallout of this later.
So what you need to do is go to Switzerland,
just go to his lecture, pretend to be a student there.
It's all going to be in German, and Moe Berg's German
was really good,
and if Heisenberg says anything at all that makes you think
he's working on an atomic bomb, you shoot him.
Shoot him right there in the lecture hall.
Don't wait. Don't follow him out
into the alley where you think it would be safer.
You just have to do it right there."
And I won't tell you how this part of the story works out,
but again, it's one of these secret agent stories
that is part of this third story line that are all --
These story lines are all going on at the same time.
And it all comes together in 1945
as they're ready to test the bomb.
This is the platform they built in New Mexico
in the desert to test the bomb.
Obviously, they wanted it to be far away
from any towns or cities
because they didn't know how huge the explosion would be
or even if it would work at all,
and see this platform at the very top of the tower?
That's just what it looks like on the inside.
There's that little kind of house
almost at the top of the platform.
This is the inside of that house,
and this is what the bomb looks like.
It looks like a monster from a science fiction movie,
but it was just --
This was what they needed to test it.
It was so complicated, they insisted that they needed
to do a test to see if it would even work.
And this poor guy was one of the scientists
who was sitting beside it,
and he was told to be the babysitter,
basically to wait with it until about an hour
before it was ready to be tested
just to make sure nothing went wrong,
and of course, he got out of there long before the explosion,
and it worked.
This is not a big surprise to you guys, I know, but it worked.
This is the first sort of millisecond of the explosion.
It formed this crazy, almost like --
This scientist described it as almost a living,
writhing bubble,
a massive mass of heat and smoke,
and then it turned into this mushroom cloud,
which everyone kind of associates
with atomic bombs now,
but at the time, of course, nobody had ever seen one before.
That's one of the things I find amazing about this story
is remember that computers hadn't been existed yet.
They hadn't been invented yet,
so they were doing all this on paper,
figuring out all this stuff theoretically,
and then, all of a sudden, it worked, and it worked.
It produced something like 15,000 tons,
the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT in this one bomb,
and so they knew that they had invented something
that would change the world, and I know this is not --
This is what the tower looked like the next day.
Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves come back to take a look at it,
and it had turned the desert into glass, the heat of it,
and apparently they're not too worried about the radiation
because they walked right up to what's left of the tower
to check it out.
You can see how skinny Oppenheimer is.
He was under so much stress during these years
that he barely ate.
They said he lived on coffee and cigarettes
if that's humanly possible,
and then, very soon after that, it was used in Japan.
This is what's left of the city of Hiroshima after one bomb,
just one bomb, was dropped on the city,
and then the second bomb few days later ended World War II.
And so that is, in a nutshell, the basics of the story,
but of course there are a lot of other things going on,
and I get into more of the science and how things work,
which I think we're going to have some demonstrations
of after this.
-That's exactly right.
-I'm also going to stick around for us to do some Q&A.
-Well, every time I hear that story
of course reading the book and then hearing you retell it,
I mean, my reaction is like,
"This is so crazy. Like, this history can't all be real,"
and the fact that it is, is just so fascinating,
so thank you for retelling it for all of us.
Steve, we'll let you kind of relax,
take a back seat here for a bit, and as you're exactly right,
we're going to be giving some demos,
but, you know, don't go too far because we got some questions,
so feel free.
I can actually switch off your webcam here.
-Good.
-And you can actually mute your microphone,
and then you can hang out here for a bit,
and I might bug you here at the end
because we've got some good questions already coming in.
So, as you guys know, my name is Chrissy Gregg,
and this is Rob Wallace.
-Hello. -I do our distance-learning
programs here, and Rob does our STEM programs here.
-Yep. -And he's created
some really cool demonstrations for you guys
based on some of these concepts from the book as we mentioned,
and so we have three poll questions,
three passages from the book,
and we have three demonstrations for you,
so that's how we're going to do it here today.
And then, when we're done, we are actually going to then
take your awesome questions,
which are coming through in that Q&A area.
If you want to keep asking questions, as I said,
just type right below us there.
So all right.
So I thought today we'd start off
our conversation here with a poll question,
and if are paying close attention,
I think that you'll know the answers to some of these.
So the first question for you all is,
what are the different parts of an atom?
Are they A, molecules and particles, B, protons,
neutrons, electrons, and a nucleus,
C, cells, radicals, and ions, or D, hydrogen and oxygen?
We're going to give you a second to vote here,
and then we're going to reveal the answer.
All right. Seems like --
I was curious if we have science groups or history groups
or maybe a little bit of both watching with us today.
All right.
I'm going to broadcast the results,
and you guys can see how you did.
It looks like about 90% got it correct, yes, protons,
neutrons, electrons, and the nucleus,
and so actually we heard
Steve talk about some of these concepts,
and the one concept that we're really going to draw out,
at least in this first question here,
is that idea of a wobbly droplet,
which you already heard him talk about.
-Mm-hmm. -And so, if you have the book
in front of you, the hardcover version here,
if you turn to page 14, you're going to see this quote.
So this, they talked over an idea proposed by the great
Danish physicist, Niels Bohr.
Bohr had recently suggested that the nucleus of an atom
might act like a wobbly droplet of liquid.
If that were true, they asked each other, what would happen
if a speeding neutron hit that nucleus of a uranium atom?
Could the force of the collision cause the uranium nucleus
to stretch and stretch just like a liquid drop until it is split?
So there you can see
what they're kind of illustrating right there
and what Steve showed us earlier.
Should we show them your demonstration first,
or do you want to add to that initially?
-Let's talk about it. -Yeah.
-And then let's show the video.
So the atom,
the idea, the model of an atom, was relatively new,
and nobody could ever see it.
Today even, we can't see those atoms, but Bohr had that idea
that it was this wobbly droplet,
and so, if we look at -- And these are all in your --
How to do all these activities are in the teacher's guide,
so this pill bottle has one bean in it.
We're going to use kidney beans,
which are very important here in New Orleans.
-Yes, red beans and rice... -Yep. Kidney beans...
-...every Monday. -...as protons
and garbanzo beans,
which are very good for hummus-making...
-Mm-hmm. -...as neutrons.
Okay?
And so we're just going to model the nucleus of an atom.
It's made of protons and neutrons,
and so a hydrogen atom,
its nucleus just has one red bean in it.
Can you see?
There's just one red bean in there.
And if we get bigger in the periodic table,
you follow the periodic table along, and you get --
This is oxygen.
Okay? So oxygen has a few more, right?
So we have the red beans, the protons, and the neutrons.
Now, think about this.
We've got these positively charged particles
and these neutrally charged particles in the nucleus,
and we're shoving them together.
Now is it very easy to shove a bunch
of positively charged things next to each other?
-I don't think they're going to like that, right?
-They're not going to like that.
It's going to take some force to hold them together,
and the neutrons kind of help out
because they spread out
that charge a little bit so that it's harder.
Now, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger an atom,
the nucleus gets much bigger,
so here we have to have a bigger jar
because this is uranium.
Okay?
-Which is what they ended up splitting.
-Yep.
This is what they ended splitting in Germany.
They split uranium,
and you can see there's some red beans in there,
and they're kind of separated out by those neutrons in there.
Now, but imagine it is a drop.
If you think of these as representing a droplet,
just one little droplet,
it's not going to be very easy
to split one little droplet, right?
But if you take a big drop like this,
it's going to be easier for it to split.
-Much easier.
-And there's going to be more desire for it to split,
more tendency for it to split because all those,
you know, 90-something protons
are shoved together, and they don't like that,
but all the negative charges are out in the electrons,
so they're not going to like that,
so you throw one garbanzo bean at that,
and it's going to split.
-Split it all up. -Okay?
-Right. -And you can get even bigger.
It's not the biggest.
So that's why it tends to be those big atoms that split,
not the little ones like carbon and oxygen.
They can split sometimes, but it's not that easy.
It's the big ones like plutonium and uranium
and radium that split like that.
They have the big nucleus.
-And plutonium and uranium ended up being the fuel
for both atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.
One was plutonium.
One was uranium, and then of course it was plutonium
for the first Trinity test, right?
-Yep, for the first test. -So...
-Yep. -Well, do you want to show them
our demo that we made a couple years ago?
-Yeah. Let's do that.
-So we actually made these a couple years ago,
so you can maybe see we look
a little different these days but...
-I've lost some weight. -And actually, Rob here has,
as you can see we're about to show, of course, a balloon,
and you're going to see me coming with scissors,
and this is going to be the wobbly droplet model.
To make sure this plays okay on your end,
we're going to pause video and audio here,
so you're going to see us freeze frame, but then we'll be back.
-So, Robin, I'm here to explain Niels Bohr's droplet model
of a nucleus and fission,
so a nucleus is like a big liquid drop, he said,
and when the nucleus gets big and unstable,
it can split, and so energy can come in,
and it can force the two sides apart,
and then something can come in like a neutron,
and they can split the two sides,
and they have a lot of energy when they split.
Let's see it again in slow motion.
-All right.
So obviously we have to do a little slow-mo
when these things go so quickly.
We're going to see it again here,
but you can see that concept
of then it's pulling apart, and then it splits.
-Yep. That's a lot of energy.
-Yeah, and it was a lot of energy,
and you see obviously, when it's a balloon, those two sides go.
We had to film that one, like, a few times
because the two sides go flying
so quickly, it's so hard to capture,
but that's exactly what's going on
when we talk about this concept.
All right, we're going to move on to concept number two,
and to do that, as I said,
we're going to ask you a poll question.
Then we're going to show you a different part of the book.
So this is one you actually have to type in something,
and we want to ask --
And if you were paying attention to Steve's beginning talk here,
you may know the answer to this.
What is the difference between fission and fusion?
-Mm. -And so you're not going
to choose anything here.
You're actually going to try to tell us
what you think the difference is.
This one may take a little longer here,
so we'll give you guys a second to --
Ooh, okay.
Obviously, yes, they look similar,
but they're spelled different.
That is a difference, of course, but we're going to talk about,
you know, what's going on.
Why are they different from one another other than in spelling?
Ooh, wow, we've got some really technical answers here,
which I really like.
-Mm-hmm. -But most of you are coming up
with the same results.
Fission -- And you can see this now.
You can scroll through here.
Fission is splitting, and fusion is bringing together,
coming together, right?
Exactly right.
So what we're going to do is look at a certain chapter
of a book that describes just that,
so again, turn to page 71 if you have this in front of you,
and this is the specific section, says,
"Theoretically, as the uranium nucleus splits in two,
more neutrons would break free and fly off on their own.
These speeding neutrons would collide
with other uranium atoms, causing them to fission also.
As these uranium atoms split,
they would release more neutrons,
which would hit more uranium atoms.
These atoms would also split, releasing more neutrons,
which would hit more uranium atoms,
causing more fission, more free-flying neutrons,
more fission, more neutrons, and so on.
Though they didn't know if it would actually happen,
physicists had a name ready for this process,
a chain reaction," and we talk about that a lot,
a sustained nuclear chain reaction,
and that's obviously key to what would become the atomic bomb.
-Right, and that was really important,
and it was one of the big innovations,
and it's kind of interesting because a nuclear power plant
runs on a sustained chain reaction,
and nuclear power plants are not very different between today
and the ones they built back then.
So fusion is how we get all the different atoms
that we have today, all the different elements.
That's what our sun does is our sun is taking hydrogen
and fusing it together into helium,
and supernovas, big explosions of the suns,
they create the larger elements by fusing,
squeezing them together,
and that does release a lot of energy.
People on Earth would --
Many engineers would love to be able to figure out
how to make fusion happen, but it creates --
It requires so much to hold it together
that they haven't figured out how to contain that reaction.
-Right.
So we thought we would actually have a --
So we've got one more video demo for you here,
and this is of me attempting to stack some dominoes
and showing you the difference between a regular reaction
and a sustained nuclear chain reaction,
and so this will hopefully be a good demonstration
of what the difference may be.
So again, what you're going to see here
is me from a couple years ago,
but we're going to pause here on live and --
Hey, everyone, Chrissy here, and what we're doing today
is we're going to show you
what a sustained nuclear chain reaction looks like.
Now we can't use a microscope or anything like that to show you,
so we need to blow it up a little bit,
and so what we're going to do to represent atoms
is actually using dominoes,
so we are going to see how one nucleus of one atom splits,
how it starts off a reaction, so let's test it out.
You guys ready? Okay.
So, in this first row of dominoes here,
this would be like a sustained nuclear chain reaction,
but what is happening here is only with one atom splitting,
causing another one to split, something like this.
But another type of sustained nuclear chain reaction,
what we're trying to do instead,
especially when creating a weapon,
is we want that reaction to grow exponentially,
so in this case, instead of one atom hitting another atom
when it splits over and over and over again,
we want one atom when it splits to hit two or more atoms,
kind of something like this domino setup,
and imagine this going on and on and on and on and on.
Okay. Let's do it.
Okay.
Let's slow it down, see that slow motion.
[ Dominoes clatter loudly ]
All right, they sound like bowling pins
when they move that slow.
-Really slow. -But anyway, think of it --
You know, I had, what, 20 or 25 dominoes there on my desk,
but this is something that's happening
with billions and billions of atoms,
and the thing to remember is that,
you know, everything is made of atoms.
We're made of atoms, the chairs we're sitting in,
my computer, you know, I mean, everything,
and so this is something that's happening many,
many times over, not just with 25 atoms in this case.
-And these concepts have become part of our social knowledge
and our way of talking,
so we talk all the time about a chain reaction.
They cause a chain reaction.
We also talk about another term, which is called critical mass,
right, and the critical mass
is the amount of the radioactive substance
that it takes to sustain a reaction.
If you don't have enough, then it's going to peter out.
The neutrons won't have enough stuff to run into
to keep the reaction going.
A critical mass, we use it in different terms today,
just enough to get it going, right?
-Mm-hmm. -And that's kind of
what it means in a nuclear reaction.
-All right, now on to our final concept,
which means one more poll question.
This may be the trickiest one, I feel like,
so our question for you is, what is an isotope?
Is it A, the total number of protons and neutrons
in a nucleus, the process, or B,
the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy,
C, a variant of an element with different number of protons,
or D, the transmission of energy
in the form of ways or particles?
Ooh. All right.
As I thought, this one might be the trickiest of the bunch,
but we'll give you maybe a second more.
-Actually, there's a mistake in there.
-Oh.
-So it should say, "Different number."
-Oh, a different number of neutrons.
Well, you guys maybe are --
-So this is a trick question. -Yeah. Okay.
So we're going to reveal the answer, so it is a variant
of a element, but look.
Chrissy had a typo, and it's a different number
of not protons, but neutrons.
-Yeah.
-But you all knew what we were talking about.
You all uncovered the real mystery.
-Yeah. You had the right idea. -So...
-So, as you go across the periodic table,
there's that big thing we call the atomic number.
That atomic number is how many protons
that an element has in it,
and if you change the number of protons,
then you change the element.
It's become a different element,
but if you change the number of neutrons,
then it's become an isotope.
For example here, this is just plain old --
I think you can see this is just plain old hydrogen,
has one particle in the nucleus,
just one proton,
and this is heavy hydrogen.
It has a proton and a neutron, and this ties into the story.
When they were making heavy water, heavy water
is made from heavy hydrogen,
and so it's water that has hydrogen
that has a neutron in the nucleus,
and so that's an isotope, and it's really hard to tell.
I mean, if you were to put these on a scale,
you could weigh them out, and most of the time,
you could tell them apart, but they would --
-Right. -Right.
But imagine that if you've got a uranium nucleus.
Okay?
So there were different isotopes of uranium,
and there's one of them in particular
that we want to make a bomb,
and that's 235, and 235 is about 1%.
Okay?
It's a very small percent of all the uranium.
The rest of it won't work,
and the different between U-235 and 238
is if I put --
I've got 235 in here, and I add three neutrons in there.
Now can you really tell the difference?
So one of the tricks --
-No, not with your own naked eye.
That's for sure.
-One of the big, big challenges in the Manhattan Project
was separating 238 from 235 to get enough 235 to make a bomb,
and in the end, they only made enough U-235
to make one bomb -- one bomb.
-Yes. -And that was the one,
the first bomb that we dropped.
What they discovered accidentally was that,
if you put 238, which is most --
Like, if you just put a big sample of uranium,
it's mostly U-238.
If you put it in a reactor
and have lots of neutrons going on in there,
it turns into plutonium, and this is plutonium,
and really you can't really tell the difference
because they're pretty close to each other.
So it would turn into plutonium, and plutonium, also,
it's even more fissionable.
It gets to critical mass even more easily,
and so what they ended up doing,
that's what the plant in Washington State did,
Hanford, they made a reactor,
and they turned U-238 into plutonium,
and then they gathered all that plutonium up
and were able to make two plutonium --
I keep using the wrong hand.
Two plutonium bombs. -Yeah.
-And one of them was tested and --
-That's Trinity.
-And one of them was dropped, the last bomb that we used.
And so plutonium is mostly what people use for bombs today
because it's easier to make and generate.
-Mm-hmm.
-And that's actually what you --
So this specific concept of the book, page 123,
talks about uranium,
but it talks about the key of these isotopes,
why they're so important to the story.
It says, "Fryman explained the basics --
how uranium atoms split when hit with neutrons."
We talked about that, chain reaction,
"How they give off energy, how a chain reaction
could lead to an explosion.
It wouldn't just work with any uranium, though.
The nucleus of a uranium atom
usually had a total of 238 protons and neutrons.
It's called U-238.
Once hit with speeding neutrons, U-238 does not fission.
It's useless to bomb makers,
but a small percentage of uranium atoms,
about 1 in every 130 or so,
have a total of 235 protons and neutrons.
This is U-235.
When U-235 is hit by neutrons,
it does split and release energy,"
so those isotopes are going to be critical
to creating the explosion.
-And I want to give a shout-out to Steve.
He did a fantastic job of describing the science in here.
I had book marked these pages long ago,
and I use them when we're developing the Manhattan Project
part of the museum, which you can come and see.
I want to preemptively answer a question somebody
asked about heavy water.
-Oh, yeah, we got one earlier about heavy water.
-And so the heavy water is a way cool part of the story.
Heisenberg was in charge.
Even though we didn't know it,
he was in charge of the German effort.
They were thinking they would finish the war
out pretty quickly and that this was --
They thought this was going to take 10 years.
And even though they had built up a lot of stuff
to go into war, they didn't have a lot of resources
in terms of energy and stuff in the war,
and so they'd back-burnered.
They put on low priority their atomic-bomb effort,
but they had also decided to try to get uranium
by putting it in a reactor with heavy water,
and it turns out that that's not that great a way to do it.
-That wasn't the best way to do it.
-Plus their heavy water wasn't that heavy.
But if you come in June, the museum will have
its new Manhattan Project gallery open,
and it will have a big rusty-looking metal barrel,
and that metal barrel was actually --
The Norwegian government got it out of the bottom of that lake,
and they sent it to us so we could put it here in the museum.
-Wow.
-So they did find those barrels,
and they did get rusty, and they were watertight,
and they tested the water, and it wasn't that heavy.
-It wasn't that heavy water.
But -- And also, I want to mention before we really,
truly open up to Q and A,
if you want to make up your own atoms using red beans, using...
-Isotopes. -...chickpeas,
and you can do this as well, so we've actually outlined --
In the teacher guide that I sent all of your teachers,
you should have the basics of how to create your own atom,
and if you didn't get it,
I actually will have it at the end here.
Steve, do you want to switch your camera
and microphone back on?
And we can... -Cut my microphone back on.
-...see what questions we have here.
All right. I can hear you.
And now... -Now we can see you.
-Yes. Now we can see you.
Okay. I want to start off with --
Actually, there's a couple
really interesting questions so --
And I don't know if we necessarily know the
answer to this, but I just --
Someone asked, "How many hours would a scientist usually work,
and, like, how intense was the work
at any of these sites that you say?"
-There was stuff going on all over the country,
but they worked all the time.
Oppenheimer tried to insist that they take a day off a week
just so they didn't burn out,
but they talked about working 16, 18 hours a day,
and he certainly did,
and you can see it even in his body as the war goes on.
He's shedding weight, but they were under so much pressure.
They really felt that it's not such a stretch
that the future of the world depended on them,
that if they lost this race, they would lose the world,
but that's really not an exaggeration.
-Yeah, if you think about it, it was --
Yeah, if you think about it, it was 1938
that they discovered fission
and were using it to make this bomb just a few years later,
and for those of you who are young,
it's hard to imagine this,
but information moved more slowly back then.
It wasn't like somebody discovered something,
and it was on Twitter, right?
It took time.
I mean, the way the news got to the United States
about it was that Niels Bohr got on a boat
and, a month later, was here, right?
And so it took a while.
They didn't even discover plutonium until 1940,
and we were using it to make a bomb,
you know, from a new element, so that was pretty crazy.
-Oh, here's some good ones.
So from Ardi Parker's class,
"Is there still radioactivity,
at least a trace amount at the Los Alamos site?"
-You can come out there once in a while.
They'll open it up.
-Sorry. Alamogordo, yeah, and the test site, yeah.
-But I think it is.
If you bring your Geiger counter out there,
you'll still get a reaction.
It's not considered dangerous anymore,
but, yeah, it's still there.
-Yeah.
They open it once every 3 years, and there are people from --
They eventually moved testing out to Nevada and out
in Bikini Islands in the Pacific, and we actually --
You know, when you'll hear sometimes oceanographers
talking about ocean currents moving
and how long it takes and such,
the way they actually know is that they have markers.
Like, they know when there's a spike of radiation.
They know it was from this particular test
or that particular test
or, as you point out in the bomb,
we knew when the Russians had tested their bomb
because we felt the radiation in the air.
So, yeah, the half-life of uranium
is about the age of our solar system,
so if you had a pile of uranium
and you put it there on the day that the Earth was born,
it would only be half as bad today
as it was on the day the Earth was born.
-That's kind of unbelievable, you know, wrap your head around.
Okay. I've got a couple question.
You guys have kind of already touched on this,
but I think people want to know, like,
how, I mean, like, how quickly was this really done?
You talked about about uranium was invented, or discovered,
and then we, you know, all of a sudden, are making these bombs.
Like, what is the timeline
between, you know, with all this stuff?
Like, how -- I was quick. -It was really fast.
It was, like, '41,
they were thinking about the feasibility of it.
'42, they started building the places, and, you know,
about 2 1/2 years later, they had this bomb.
-And then, yeah, by 1945 then,
the tests and then above the two.
So the tests in July,
and of course both atomic bombs were dropped in August.
All right, I don't know if either of you
know the answer to this. -Yeah.
-Is the stadium or squash court still there in Chicago?
-Yes. -Think that's kind of --
-And you can visit.
It's at the University of Chicago.
-[ Laughs ]
-Yeah, and actually,
they were supposed to be building a facility
for Fermi to test his ideas at,
and that became Argonne National Lab,
and they weren't moving very fast,
and that's when he moved onto the squash court,
and it was after the test was successful, they said,
"Uh-oh. We better
get a move on with this place for him to do his research
because in Downtown Chicago is not a good place."
-Right. Yeah.
Realizing the issues there.
And then do you --
I guess the effects of the radiation,
were any of those scientists direct --
-Yeah. -I mean, you saw obviously
that image of here Leslie Groves,
and we see Oppenheimer here the next day at the site.
Did they understand the kind of radiation
that would've been emitted from this, you know, weapon?
-No. -Yeah.
-They -- Although those scientists saw --
Most of them lived pretty --
You know, ones who weren't spies lived pretty long
and happy lives.
Now there was an accident shortly after this.
They call it the demon core.
There was a third plutonium core that they were testing,
and there were two different accidents with it,
and some guys got killed by the radiation
for that in a really ugly way.
-All right, and since we're about at 1:00 Central Time here,
think my last question I'm going to have is for Steve.
Do you want to -- A lot of students are wondering
about the process of writing this book,
so, like, how long did that take you?
So when you just had this initial concept
to then actually publishing, like, what --
I know you talked about doing research, but could you --
-The whole process was probably about two years.
If you include the idea, the research, lots of notes,
that's kind of, like, the first half,
and then the second half is the writing and revision,
and so each of those takes close to a year,
which I know sounds like a long time to be working on one thing,
but the different steps in the process
and kind of the third quarter is the writing the first draft,
and then the fourth quarter is the revising.
And you can see behind me part of a kind of bulletin board.
My whole office is surrounded by these great blank walls
that I put up notes on, and that's my way of outlining.
It's really a movie, a screen-writing
and movie making technique
to write down ideas for scenes, put them on index cards.
I have thousands of index cards. -Yeah.
-I'm using different colors for the different story lines,
so for "Bomb", I would have one for the scientist,
one for spies, one for that secret agent,
and then spread them out by taping them on the wall
until it sort of starts to form a story, an outline,
and that is kind of the middle of the process.
I've done the research, but I haven't done the writing yet.
I find that to be the most interesting part of the process,
and then it's really hard to actually write it,
so getting started on the actual first draft,
I know everyone I talk to says the same thing.
My kids feel the same way.
That's the hardest part.
-Someone was actually asking what was behind you.
They wanted to know what your setup is.
-Yeah. -So I'm glad you explained
your bulletin board kind of mapping out.
-If any of you stay a long time in school,
what he just said applies to dissertations, as well.
-Yeah, so that will be a few years from --
-Take your notes reading papers.
That's the best part.
-Well, I'm sorry to say
that I guess I haven't timed it all correctly.
We're now at 1:01 Central Time, so actually,
I might transition into the last area of the room
and share some resources, but so this is the last time
you'll actually see us, everybody,
so thank you so much..
-Yes. Thanks, Steve.
-...and thank you, Steve, for joining us here today
and really sharing this story.
It's so, so great, and for those of you
who haven't gotten a copy of Steve's book,
please do, and, of course, all of your other books, as well.
So I'm going to transition to the last part of the room,
and we're going to go away, here, for a second,
but you're going to see some resources pop up, and first off,
as this slideshow loads, you can purchase "Bomb" today.
So if you click on that hyperlink where it says,
"Purchase," that's where you can actually, you know,
buy the book, and in addition,
you saw some of Steve's books at the beginning of the program.
Here is a few more.
Like I said, they've all won so many awards.
They're really compelling books
all about all different parts of history,
and if you're just a World War II fan,
he's got another one, "Port Chicago 50,"
which is a big munitions explosion out in California,
a really compelling story.
So please check out Steve's books.
Also, we want to share some museum resources with you,
so two kind of science-related resources.
For teachers -- Well, actually, why don't you take this, Rob?
-Yeah, so we have curriculum that focuses mostly,
for now, on middle school,
and it's called Real World Science,
and that's available on that website right there,
ww2realworldscience.org.
We also have a summer teacher institute
for fifth through eighth-grade teachers.
We just selected the summer's cohort now,
but next January, you can apply, teachers.
We also have a website called WWII Science and Technology,
and it's getting a little old,
but it has lesson plans and stuff on there
for older students, as well. -Yeah.
It's got a good darkroom with --
-You can also ask questions about science
and World War II at ask the expert
at the nationalww2museum.org
-And you can see some of the videos that we filmed
to respond to those questions
actually on that site, as well, so those are pretty fun.
And then, lastly, so I know we've got science teachers.
I know we've got history teachers and maybe everybody
in between watching with us.
Check out our World War II curriculum.
This is more focused on social studies standards here,
but it's at ww2classroom.org,
and you can see a screen shot there,
and of course the hyperlink there.
History teachers, the lesson plan
that I featured in the teacher guide
is from this site.
Right now we have all of our lesson plans
about the Pacific up here.
Soon you'll have more lesson plans about Europe,
and so there will be a lot to see and explore here
with a lot of artifacts, oral histories,
videos from museum galleries, things like that,
to really tell the story.
Lastly, and we keep referencing this teacher guide.
If you didn't get it from me, you can see in that files box
underneath the image,
there, that's where you can download the teacher guide
with lesson plans from real world science
and, of course, the activities we talked about today
and a lesson plan from ww2classroom.
And, actually, I think that I'm out of announcements,
here, so --
-Yep. -Thank you, Steve, again.
We really appreciate your time with us today,
and thanks to everybody virtually out there
in the audience.
You asked some really fantastic questions, and...