Introductions.- I: Him.- II: Us.- It and Them. At First.- Front to Front.- To Dark and Mysterious Places.- Fission Discovered.- And Einstein Signed a Letter.- From Harvard to Los Alamos.- Los Alamos.
José Ignacio Latorre is a Full Professor of Theoretical Physics on scientific leave from the University of Barcelona. Currently, he is the director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies of Singapore and Chief Research of the Quantum Research Centre of Abu Dhabi. He has co-founded the Benasque Centre of Science Pedro Pascual and of the enterprise Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, which is building the first quantum computer in Southern Europe. He is the author of Cuántica and Ética para máquinas, both in Spanish and published by Ariel (Planeta).
María TeresaSoto-Sanfiel (Maite) is a PhD in Audiovisual Communication. She has developed most of her academic-scientific career at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Currently, she enjoys a scientific leave as Associate Professor of the Department of Communications and New Media and performs as Principal Researcher at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, both at the National University of Singapore. Maite has directed the documentary That´s the story: Roy J. Glauber remembers the making of the atomic bomb, which is the seed of this book.
Most human beings don’t manage to achieve fame. Roy J. Glauber did so for two different reasons.
Glauber was not only a Nobel-Prize winning physicist, but also one of the last surviving scientists who worked in Los Alamos in the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project. He was a witness to all the events and knew all the scientists associated with the creation and launch of the first atomic bombs.
This book is the product of a series of long interviews held with Roy over three years: in Benasque (Spain) in 2011, and later in Singapore and Cambridge (USA). Its pages give a first-hand account of a true protagonist, one who is independent, lucid, sagacious and committed to the truth. The authors have respectfully preserved his spirit: his voice is the one that matters. The authors asked the questions and they relay his answers. Their comments are confined to the footnotes and to brief explanatory paragraphs, added simply to provide certain relevant details.
The importance of the events that Glauber describes here is indisputable, as therefore is the book itself. The events narrated in its pages will remain part of world history, perhaps for centuries or even millennia. We live today in the shadow of the decisions made at that time.
