Manhattan: The Understudy First Watch
November 14, 2016 1:27 PM - Season 1, Episode 10 - Subscribe
Frank, Charlie and Lazar try to figure out how to make an explosion go inwards. Abby and Elodie get existential. And a visitor from California comes seeking answers.
Hotshot physicist Charlie Isaacs and onetime adversary Frank Winter have teamed up to make an plutonium bomb that will actually work—unlike the "Thin man" project Charlie is supposed to be leading. Few others know what they're up to, and if they can't solve the problems with the shockwave needed to compress the plutonium, it will cost them their jobs, maybe even their careers. The problem: it's impossible. That is at least, according to a phalanx of British scientists and Los Alamos's resident explosives expert, Lazar, the Russian Cowboy. Isaacs and Winter need to turn explosions inside out, so that the shockwave is concave (bending in) instead of convex (bending out).
The problem of creating the shaped charges was left to George Kistiakowsky, the leader of the Explosives Division on the Hill. “He was the only one that really knew about how to make explosive lenses in an innovative way,” recalls William Lowe, a chemical engineer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. “They had to coordinate the absolutely accurate timing of setting off the lenses so that the explosion wave arrived and that compression of the little sphere, the center of the bomb, were at the same time, so it would squeeze it instead of blowing it apart. That was an awfully difficult problem to solve.”
Hotshot physicist Charlie Isaacs and onetime adversary Frank Winter have teamed up to make an plutonium bomb that will actually work—unlike the "Thin man" project Charlie is supposed to be leading. Few others know what they're up to, and if they can't solve the problems with the shockwave needed to compress the plutonium, it will cost them their jobs, maybe even their careers. The problem: it's impossible. That is at least, according to a phalanx of British scientists and Los Alamos's resident explosives expert, Lazar, the Russian Cowboy. Isaacs and Winter need to turn explosions inside out, so that the shockwave is concave (bending in) instead of convex (bending out).
The problem of creating the shaped charges was left to George Kistiakowsky, the leader of the Explosives Division on the Hill. “He was the only one that really knew about how to make explosive lenses in an innovative way,” recalls William Lowe, a chemical engineer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. “They had to coordinate the absolutely accurate timing of setting off the lenses so that the explosion wave arrived and that compression of the little sphere, the center of the bomb, were at the same time, so it would squeeze it instead of blowing it apart. That was an awfully difficult problem to solve.”
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