On July 16th, 1945, a team of U.S. scientists based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, conducted what their leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer,

had named the Trinity Test.

They were detonating a new kind of bomb, way out in the desert, a couple hundred miles from the secret lab at Los Alamos

where they had created it. The US President Harry Truman seemed to fully grasp the

magnitude of this moment.

It is an atomic bomb.

It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

Oppenheimer had put together a dream team of experienced physicists, many of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany.

Also, playing a minor but important role, was a 24-year-old physicist from Queens, New York named Richard Feinman.

Years later, here is how Feinman described watching the Trinity Test.

Okay, time comes, and this tremendous flash so bright and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck.

I says that ain't it. That's an after image. So I turned back up and I see this white light

changing into yellow and into orange. The clouds form and then they disappear again. And then

finally a big ball of orange is started to rise and below a little bit

and get a little bit black around the edges and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes

on the inside of the fire going out the heat.

All this took about one minute.

Finally, after about a minute and a half, suddenly there's a tremendous noise, bang!

And then rumbles like thunder.

And that's what convinced me.

Nobody had said a word during this whole minute.

We're all just watching quavish.

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