"In December 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved a milestone in human history: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi, the father of the nuclear age. But as David N. Schwartz shows in this groundbreaking biography, Fermi's impact goes well beyond this epochal event. With his theory of beta decay and his development of quantum statistics, Fermi revolutionized modern physics. Straddling the...

This biography of Oppenheime explores how the West influenced J. Robert Oppenheimer as a scientist and person and how he influenced it. The author describes how Oppenheimer's life changed the course of history, as he helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico and transformed the area as the atomic West.

"A scientist's recollection of his life as a junior member of the Manhattan Project, Rider of the Pale Horse recounts McAllister Hull's involvement in various nuclear-related enterprises during and after World War II. Fresh from a summer job working with explosives in the chemistry department of an ordnance plant, Hull was drafted in 1943, after his freshman year in college. Unlike other accounts written by scientists and historians of that era, Hull's...

"The gripping biography of a notorious Cold War villain -- the German-born British scientist who handed the Soviets top-secret American plans for the plutonium bomb -- showing a man torn between conventional loyalties and a sense of obligation to a greater good"-- Klaus Fuchs was convicted of espionage by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous agents...

When Wu Chien Shiung was born in China in the early 1900s, girls typically did not attend school. They weren't considered as smart as boys. But her parents thought differently, so they gave her a name meaning "courageous hero" and encouraged her love of learning and science. Chien Shiung found her passion in physics, which took her from her small hometown of Liuhe to the National Central University in Nanjing and then all the way to the United States....