The best Nuclear Physics books: Reddit reviews

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https://www.amazon.fr/Slow-Death-Days-Radiation-Sickness/dp/1942993544 read this. It’s a book about the slow death of a Japanese guy who got exposed to high doses of radiation after an nuclear accident. The book follows his battle that lasted 83 days. There is a picture of him on his last days and you don’t want to see that. It’s horrifying. On a side note, radiation sickness is fascinating. What it can do to the body is terrifyingly interesting.

Not exactly

The German scientists who were working on the Nazi nuclear program were taken prisoner by the British and kept incarcerated in Britain. Their rooms were bugged, and they were secretly recorded discussing in disbelief the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. They knew the science and theory, but many of them didn't believe it was possible.

You are correct they didn't have sufficient uranium. Indeed, thanks to the Allied special forces and air-raids, and Norwegian resistance fighters, the only access to heavy water was destroyed and the largest shipment of heavy water itself was sunk (ironically).

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It won a Pulitzer Prize in its own right. An utterly fascinating book and extremely well written.

If you could imagine it, most atom bombs throughout the 50s were actually incredibly wasteful in their maximum potential power. I can't remember exact figures, but out of the entire atomic payload allotted for Fat Boy - the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki - only a fraction of a fraction of atoms reacted and split. The vast majority of atoms were wasted, but the miniscule amount that did successfully react were still enough to level and entire city and kill untold thousands. We're talking tens of atoms out of a potential billion plus.

God only knows what kind of incomprehensible levels of destruction could be achieved with the precision technology and further development we've made in weapons of war since the 70s. It's almost something simply not worth thinking of.

Midnight in Chernobyl has an excellent chapter on the history, utilization, and weaponization of atomic energy during the cold war before the era of the so-called "Peaceful Atom" in the 70s. Highly recommend it if you're looking for further reading on the subject!

>Where do you get that from?

Midnight in Chernobyl and Voices from Chernobyl, both of which I read after watching the HBO shows.

>In the series, radiation is so much more dangerous than in reality.

It took Ignatenko two weeks to die, during which time he excreted blood and mucus stool more than 25 times a day and coughed up pieces of his own internal organs. Ignatenko was one of 27 firefighters who died of acute radiation sickness in the weeks after the disaster.

The Elegant Universe did a pretty decent job of explaining it in terms I could understand. I think the author Brian Greene, has a documentary on YouTube too.

There’s a book that goes into this too, saying the family wanted to continue with treatment is only a fraction of the story when the DRs had their motivations too.

At one point he received a stem cell transplant from his sister and was actively improving before declining again. And there were three men who were exposed to radiation. Two died, one lived.

https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Death-Days-Radiation-Sickness/dp/1942993544

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Theoretical-Leonard-Susskind/dp/0465062903

book on quantum mechanics

If you want a book that is a little more personal (focusing on the people and their advancements), I would recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I have not read the whole book yet, as it is 900 pages, but it is really good at the beginning.

This is exaggerated. He was a skeptic in very early days, but so were a lot of physicists. Rutherford was very doubtful of it working, he did more push back than Einstein by far. By 1939, when Szilárd explained the idea to use graphite to make it work, Einstein understood it right away. He agreed to help right away.

This book gives a lot of details about it, and I thought it was a great book. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618

For much more backstory on this, one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. For once the blurb on Amazon is entirely accurate, so I'll copy/paste it here:

The definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.

From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.

Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618

A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942993544/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_YWFHJPMCVS0C6X1DK7WK

Here is an excellent book on the subject. It was very engrossing. One I read the first few pages, it was ON!!

Yeah I find this comes up for me a lot. I don't have a science background, dropped physics in highschool, can't do math without a spreadsheet to save my damn life.

That being said, a couple of these authors here were a huge jumping off point for me to become excited and energized at the concept; they may not go into the nuts and bolts of things but in terms of illuminating concepts and translating nearly undefinable ideas to a brain like mine it's essential.

I don't know, I think people like to pass judgement, but I find with QM there's as much art to the explanations as science, at least when you're starting to learn; you can hear the same explanation ten times, and then the right author comes along and number 11 is the one that breaks the concept wide open for you.

For what it's worth, that Halpern book I think is pretty well regarded as a historical account, I think the Carroll one is also good. Both little books are meant to be summations.

If you're anything like me and want to go "next level" on this stuff, I started with the Theoretical Minimum by Susskind and Friedman. It seems to hold up to a lot of scrutiny and is a text that appears in first year classes a lot. I'd be lying if I told you I understood it and it didn't kick my ass, but it may be what you're looking for as a next foray.
Finally Rovelli is a damn treasure and his face should be on money. Fight me.

This is a dumb reply. Just because it didn’t kill a lot of people, and the background radiation is low doesn’t mean you want to go around digging thing up and disturbing souls in the exclusion zone. My point was just that people hadn’t been routinely dying from the radiation. There’s a whole Wikipedia article about it and a nice treatment in Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey, a nuclear physicist/reactor safety expert. I’m basically just restating the expert consensus.

That’s a modeling number, but not confirmed with real world data from actual cases. The Wikipedia article addressed that, and Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey has a chapter about it.

There's actually a really interesting book about escaping LA during a catasrophe and how to survive in the wild afterward.

EMERGENCY by Neil Strauss

According to Rhodes books The Making of the Atomic Bomb & Dark Sun, the Japanese had 2 separate atomic bomb projects. One was located in Tokyo and the other was located in what is now North Korea (around the Chosin Reservoir - where some fierce Korean War battles took place). Also, the Japanese high command knew what happened in Hiroshima the same day it was nuked - they sent some of the scientists from the Tokyo bomb project by train. They argued that since it took the Allies 4 years to build the first nuke, it would take them 4 years to build the next nuke (surprise!).

Dark Sun is a fascinating book because it includes a lot of Soviet information after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He makes the argument that every nations' atom bomb project came from Los Alamos - either by partnership or by spying. Furthermore, as nations learned how to keep those sorts of secrets much better, every nation that developed thermonuclear bombs did so on their own.

The "physics package" for what would be bomb #3 was on an airplane flying from San Diego to Hawaii when the surrender was announced over the radio.

It is my belief that the anti-nuke sentiment has been driven by Soviet and Japanese propaganda over the years. It is long past the point where those sentiments are now self-driven.

It sure is! There was a time when this was not true of Soviet reactors, but early western reactors were generally substantially safer than early Soviet reactors. It had to do with the way the reaction was mediated. In fact, the Chernobyl disaster occured specifically because it was of a Soviet design whose uncontrolled position was 'explode'. You should read Midnight in Chernobyl if you want to learn more about it. Absolutely fascinating book.

The human jaw uses the most calcium in a person body. The body metabolizes the radium the same as calcium. But doesn't form bone the same way. This is the reason Raydathor helped Mr Byers with he arm injury. Oddly enough the inventor of Raydathor William J. A. Bailey claimed to have drank as much as Byers. There is currently a Doctoral student doing their thesis on the evolution of humans and if several generations in the future of the adverse human will be immune to radiation.

If you find this interesting read about the radium girls. They worked with a paint called "undark". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls?wprov=sfti1

A very interesting book Atomic Accidents https://www.amazon.com/dp/1605986801/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_a_C4KG03DWBN2METAMVAR5

I think the whole space is filled by the different quantum fields simultanously, ie there is the electromagnetic field and the electron fields, which have some values at each point of space-time (there is of course uncertainty, because even the fields have to obey the Heisenberg uncertainty relations). Each of these fields is controlled by a particular partial differential equation, so the electron/positron quantum field is controlled by the Dirac equation, and other fields are controlled by the Klein-Gordon equation. The quantum field theory of these free fields is realatively simple. The complicated stuff happens when these quantum fields interact, ie. when the electromagnetic fields starts interaction with the electron/positron field. This gives rise to the famous Feynman diagrams. I once even understood how to derive the Feynman diagrams using the Dyson series. If you want to learn more about it, then learn from the master himself

https://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691024170

I am not. It was a Japanese man and it was not a scientist, just a random low level employee at the nuclear plant. The book was A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness.

It's kept in a non critical mass configuration with control rods and neutron absorbers such as boron. Most reactor fuel is a relatively low concentration of u235 to u238.

A lot of danger comes from the enrichement process, which has been a source of what are known as "criticality" accidents. James Mahaffey has an excellent book about pretty muc ever nuclear and radiological accident in recorded history, good primer to start with anyway.

https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-Mountains/dp/1605986801

Also, a wikipedia read of "Criticality accident" would give ya some more info than i could sitting here typing atcha.

I find this comment on the Amazon reviews and I would like to ask how accurate the comment actually is:

>3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best account

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2019

>
>I have read a lot of books and technical reports on this appalling disaster.This books adds little that is new. It contains a number of technical inaccuracies which make me wonder if the author actually understood what happened that day.

"The truth about Chernobyl" by Grigory Medvedev and "Atomic accidents" by James Mahaffey are both more accurate, the first giving a full account and the second a brief overview.

Can anybody speak to the validity of this comment?

Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey is exactly what you are looking for. Comprehensive coverage of atomic energy since its inception and the accidents that come with it. I jokingly felt like I had a phD in nuclear energy when I was done reading it.

This is the perfect read to understand why this would never happen again :https://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Chernobyl-Greatest-Nuclear-Disaster-ebook/dp/B07GNV7PNH

Literally every bit of hiding and rushing that put the nuclear reactor at risk was carried out by the Soviet state to be "first" to get working nuclear energy.

They literally told people to ignore the warning signs because it would make them look bad (I don't believe this would happen here outside of maybe the issue of mass migration)

But those are all bombs using additional lithium deuteride to increase the strength of the bomb. Those can be made smaller, but working fission reactors require a lot of mediating material to control the speed of neutrons and allow for fission to take place. And if you don’t want all of that mediating material? Well fast reactors are a thing, but they have traditionally used liquid sodium (the stuff that catches on fire with water in the air even) and that hasn’t been a successful adventure so far…I suggest you readthis. It’s a very good book with a lot of information in an entertaining package.

Emergency by Neil Strauss comes to the same conclusion. Getting plugged in to your community through disaster preparedness programs is the way to go!

That actually would be interesting to read. I imagine there are some stories from people who got out. I know Anthony Bourdain spoke to a woman who had escaped North Korea on one of his shows, it was both fascinating and heartbreaking.

I read a book on Chernobyl a few years ago that I thought showed pretty clearly how checked out people were and how that was part of what lead to the disaster there.

I also had a lot of friends who parents or grandparents were immigrants growing up, and a few who’s parents had left the USSR in the early 90’s. They didn’t like to talk about it much - most of the others talked about the old country quite a bit. I thought that was interesting.

This sub will be overwhelmingly supportive of any idea you have (which is typically a very good thing), but it sounds like you may benefit a lot from reading books meant for an audience of people without a background in physics before you jump into this. This one is great, and there are other books with fewer equations you might also like. Getting a physics degree will require a very strong math background, and on top of that it’ll be two years or so of slogging along before you get to the sorts of things you’re envisioning (quantum mechanics, particle physics). If you’re worried your interest may be gone by then, it may be good to step back and do more thinking first.

Susskind’s book (Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465062903/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_n5f9FbT9VTEFY ) and the corresponding free lectures which cover the same material (https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/quantum-mechanics/2012/winter).

I also took a course on the subject which used Griffith’s text, but I feel I got more out of The Theoretical Minimum, honestly.

Here’s a vid!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p3P4iKb24Ng

I’d read The Elegant Universe too. It’s a great intro to a bunch of topics that physics is currently covering:

https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions-Ultimate/dp/039333810X

I’m sure if you asked your parents to buy this for you, they’d be down