Destroyer of Worlds

Was Marie Curie really the greatest female physicist of the early 20th century? Could the atomic energy contained in a kilogramme of radium really drive a ship across the Atlantic? Did a traffic light near the Royal Institution really give Leo Szilard his idea of the chain reaction? And was Oppenheimer really the "father of the atomic bomb"? This talk reveals how Henry Becquerel's accidental discovery, in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age and reveals some of the myths that have grown around this saga.

Based on Frank Close's new book, Destroyer of Worlds, the talk is the story of how pursuit of this hidden nuclear power source, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called "backyard weapon", that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.

Professor Frank Close

Frank Close OBE FRS is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

He is a particle physicist who recently made his 16th appearance on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. The author of several popular science books he is the only scientist to have won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions.