Index#: 07579
Will NOT Count Towards Chemistry MAJOR
Will Count Towards Chemistry MINOR
The proposed SAS Honors seminar will cover a broad swath of subject material from the 20th century physics developments that led to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, the military and political decision making related to this, and the consequences of the successful development and deployment of atomic weapons used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
As a seminar course, there will be introductory organizational meetings and some basic lecture materials that will span the development of nuclear weapons to a current inventory of known nuclear weapons arsenals to scientific studies of the consequences of testing and use of nuclear weapons, leading to the foundations for a discussions of a current risk assessment for these uniquely lethal weapons of mass destruction. After the initial lectures, the seminar will progress to weekly discussions of assigned material, combined with specific film studies.
Assigned readings will be combined with student-selected readings. Examples of assigned readings will include selected chapters from the Richard K. Rhodes books, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and “Dark Sun”. Initial discussions will focus on whether the vast potential for destructive force that arises with the discovery by humans of atomic structure, the neutron, and nuclear fission and fusion could ever be contained and not weaponized. More broadly, have there ever by consequential scientific, engineering and technological developments that can be used for great good and great evil purposes?
The seminar will move on to discussions the letters inspired, coordinated and written by and with Leo Szilard. Discussions will begin with the well known letter sent to President Roosevelt by Albert Einstein, though suggested and drafted by L. Szilard. Following the first successful Trinity test of the atomic bomb near Alamogordo, Szilard and others who witnessed the test immediately wrote another letter to President Truman, that both predicted the likelihood that nuclear weapons would be relatively quickly invented and deployed by other major powers, and provided a detailed outline of the global arms race that would immediately ensue if the new weapons were ever used. Both of these letters will be considered and critically discussed, with the key question to be focused on being, “Is there any other outcome that could have been achieved?”
A humanistic perspective will be introduced by having students read selections from Susan Southard's book “Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War” and Kazuo Ishiguro's first book, “A Pale View of Hills”. The latter refers of course to the perspective of the hills surrounding Nagasaki that would not typically have been visible in 1945 had the city not been leveled on August 9.
Subsequent readings will be selected individually by students in consultation with the instructor.
About Professor Castner
Professor Ed Castner, of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is a physical chemist interested in a broad range of problems involving intermolecular interactions and dynamics in the condensed phase. Specific projects of interest in his group focus on room-temperature ionic liquids and polymer aggregates. Current projects focus both on understanding the fundamental interactions between these new designer materials, as well as finding applications for them in fields as diverse as energy storage and environmental remediation. The research team uses a broad array of experimental methods, including synchrotron-based high-energy X-ray scattering, neutron scattering, NMR, and ultrafast laser spectroscopy. When not on campus, he might be organizing an international research symposium or conducting experiments at a national laboratory, or perhaps riding a bike to somewhere interesting or playing in a blues or funk club in Chicago, Europe, Japan, or right here in central NJ.