Destroyer of Worlds

Destroyer of Worlds is a cogent, detailed account of one of history’s brightest and darkest chapters, in which amazing scientific insights into atoms and their nuclei coincided with fascism and world-wide conflict. Frank Close shows us how the initial dreams of beneficial atomic energy were transmuted, with frightening speed, into nightmares. Amidst our current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and other game-changing technologies, this book offers us all a stern warning – Matt Strassler, author of Waves in an Impossible SeaKinetic, dramatic, and compulsively readable, Destroyer of Worlds follows dozens of astounding scientific discoveries that led to the development of nuclear weapons. In powerful, plain language, Close connects humanity’s unstoppable scientific curiosity to our species’ strange willingness to visit existential threats upon ourselves – Patchen Barss, author of The Impossible ManIf you enjoyed the movie “Oppenheimer,” you will be thrilled by Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds. With a knack for explaining the history of nuclear energy in simple terms, Close takes us to the “rooms where it happened,” revealing the struggles, mistakes, and triumphs that led from the discovery of radioactivity to up to the nuclear age – Robert Cahn, co-author of Grace in All SimplicityOnce again, Frank Close explains sophisticated science in a way that anyone can understand, and tells a gripping story in the process: how a smudge in a photographic plate in March 1896 led, almost inexorably, to the development of the most terrifying weapons of war ever created. Along the way we are introduced to the fascinating characters who propelled this drama, people like Roentgen and Becquerel, Rutherford and the Curies, Bohr and Einstein, Fermi and Szilard, Teller and Oppenheimer, and a host of other geniuses whose scientific curiosity led mankind down a dark path indeed. For those interested in how the quest to understand radioactivity and the atomic nucleus led to the development of the hydrogen bomb, this book is a great place to start – David Schwartz, author of The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Frank Close is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of The Infinity Puzzle- Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe and most recently Trinity- The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. He was formerly Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his ‘outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics’ in 1996, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013.