Ernest O. Lawrence

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Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, various military officials met at the campground to advance the research, and ultimately created the first atomic bomb.

Right.

Um, but yeah, that started, uh, the creation of care...

It was, like, a big one.

But okay, so it obviously got people talking, but his career renaissance really kicked off when he was cast as Ernest Lawrence, a nuclear physicist, in Oppenheimer, which obviously, huge movie.

The, it won an Oscar for Best Picture, so it was, like, basically right off the jump, he got into an Oscar-winning movie.

And I was, like, looking into this, 'cause for being, like, so out of the loop and out of Hollywood for so long- He is in really big movies with really big stars and big directors.

The Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant used devices called calutrons, a name derived from California University cyclotron.

because the technology was developed by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley.

A calutron works by ionizing uranium, stripping electrons from uranium atoms to give them an electrical charge, and then accelerating the charged atoms through a strong magnetic field.

Because U-235 atoms are slightly lighter than U-238 atoms, they follow a slightly tighter curve in the magnetic field, and the two isotopes can be collected in separate receptacles at the end of their curved paths.

In September of 1942, in the middle of World War II, a small group of scientists and military officers held a meeting at the Bohemian Grove.

Around the table were some of the most important physicists in the country, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Arthur Compton.

Some were on the executive committee of a secret program codenamed S1.

Eventually, it would become the Manhattan Project.