Did you see Oppenheimer? It’s a great movie (honestly, I think it would have made an outstanding TV series). But if you’ve seen the movie (which I highly recommend), you know it’s a whirlwind of names, places, and scientific discoveries. So knowing the basic history and physics of atomic energy makes the movie a lot more approachable.

And in that vein, let me suggest listening to Episode Two of Wild Thing: Going Nuclear. It’s a primer on the basics (the very basics) of atomic energy. The original purpose of this episode was to help explain the events that unfolded roughly 20 years later at SL-1. However, the roots of both SL-1 and the Manhattan Project are the same. How did we figure out that such a tiny particle—an atom—held so much power? For that matter, what is an atom? And just how does nuclear energy work?

In Episode Two “Out of Little Things”, we go back to the 1930s, when physicist Enrico Fermi and a handful of other brilliant physicists had started to puzzle out just how much energy atoms contained. By the 1940s, Fermi had figured out how to capture that energy and built the first functioning nuclear reactor under the athletic stadium at the University of Chicago (good thing he got the math right).

Everyone immediately recognized its potential—good and bad. On one hand, it could provide a tremendous source of electrical energy; on the other, an incredibly powerful and devastating weapon. Fears that Germany’s fascist government would develop that nuclear weapon meant that these scientists ended up thinking more about the military applications first—leaving the plans for developing peacetime nuclear energy to the future.

As we’re all aware, this technology led directly to the horrifying devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and definitively proved the destructive capabilities of the atom. But with the end of the war, even as we continued building atomic weapons, scientists, the military, and the government returned to the idea of nuclear energy. We knew we could harness atomic power for destruction; now we wanted to see how we could use it for good.

The problem, of course, was separating out the beneficial uses from the bomb in the minds of the public. In the aftermath of World War II, under the "Atoms for Peace" program, the American government made plans to tame the atom: to provide abundant energy, to power our cars and planes, to build huge public works projects, and to revolutionize medicine. This nuclear-fueled nation became the latest iteration of the American Dream, the dawn of a new era in science, one that stirred people’s emotions and hopes (similar to what would happen with NASA a few years later).

In Episode Three "A New(clear) Hope" (that title is for you, Star Wars fans), we get a sense of just how promising nuclear seemed in the post-war era—the futuristic visions of nuclear-powered airplanes and cutting-edge reactors—and how that promise always seemed a little tainted by fear. What were our goals? What would this atomic utopia look like? And did we truly think we could harness the atom without any risk?

Special thanks to Dr. Pete Markowitz at Florida International University, who spent hours on the phone, walking me through the ins and outs of nuclear physics. Trying to grasp these concepts reminded me of the Physics For Poets sketch by comedian Patton Oswalt. (Warning: The language is a little salty—certainly words I would never use. Hi Mom.)

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