Los Alamos National Laboratory

Special acknowledgment to those whose work contributed largely to this report is made to the Special Manhattan Engineer District Investigating Group, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the British Mission to Japan, and the Joint Atomic Bomb Investigating Group, Medical, and particularly to the following individuals: Colonel Stafford L. Warren, Medical Corps, United States Army, for his evaluation of medical data; Captain Henry L. Barnett, Medical Corps, United States Army, for his evaluation of medical data; Dr. R. Surber for his comments on flash burn; Dr. Hans Bethe, Cornell University, for his information on the nature of atomic explosions; Majors Noland Varley and Walter C. Youngs, Corps of Engineer, United States Army, for their evaluation of physical damage to structures; J.O. Hirschfelder, J.L. McGee, M.

Hall, and S.T. Cohen of the Los Alamos Laboratory for their data on nuclear explosions; Lieutenant Colonel David B. Parker, Corps of Engineers, United States Army, for editing this report.

Introduction: Statement by the President of the United States, quote, Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT.

Neumann ring a bell? Yeah.

okay so this dude has put his name on everything and for good reason uh so southern automata are independently discovered by two very bright people at los alamos when they're turning big atoms into little atoms so john von neumann who's a mathematician and turned physicist and stanislav ulam who is less known than john von neumann but is um in many cases, just as influential.

So he goes on to discover Monte Carlo simulations.

And a crazy encephalitis story.

Oh, really?

Please tell.

So how he came up with the Monte Carlo thing is that he got encephalitis while at Los Alamos, had to go down to the hospital in Santa Fe.

All of his math friends, like Ron Neumann and Wiener and all of those folks were like, we need to visit Stanislaus because they wanted to be in Santa Fe rather than in Los Alamos.

Read by James Sobel Kelly.

During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers.

At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out, Where is everybody? Or, as another participant remembered it, don't you ever wonder where everybody is? If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them? The episode has become famous marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem.

For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the Moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible.

Summer 2011.

Severe drought and record wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico burned more than 1 million acres and threatened the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as two high-voltage lines transmitting electricity from Arizona to approximately 400,000 customers in New Mexico and Texas.

July 2011.

ExxonMobil's Silver Tip Pipeline, buried beneath the Yellowstone River in Montana, was torn apart by flood-caused debris spilling oil into the river and disrupting crude oil transport in the region.

That silence is the most profound mystery in science, and confronting it honestly, without retreating into comfortable certainties or unfounded speculation, is what comes next.

In the summer of 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, four physicists sat down for lunch.

enrico fermi edward teller herbert york and emil konopinski had been discussing a recent new yorker magazine cartoon depicting aliens carrying trash cans stolen from new york city streets the conversation drifted from the cartoon to flying saucer reports that had been circulating in the popular press and then naturally toward a more serious question.

Given the age of the galaxy, the abundance of stars, and the apparent feasibility of interstellar travel even at sub-light speeds, surely at least one advanced civilization should have visited or colonized the galaxy by now.

This has been around a while, these concepts.

They were really a big part of the discussion, at least at Los Alamos, we were having around how could we take safety to the next level.

I always think about this, that I don't think of human performance as what's new.

I think of human performance as what's next.

And I'm curious to see what will follow, what human performance will breed.

Because all these ideas kind of breed new ideas and new ideas.

But we worked really hard at a place like Los Alamos because your introduction was amazing.

And thank you for that.

And She needed a job.

Los Alamos National Laboratory was looking, and she went to a job fair, and she got a job at Los Alamos.

So she moves there.

And she is working in the department that is managing the nuclear weapons stockpile.