On August 6, 1945, the sky above the Japanese city of Hiroshima opened. A blinding flash, then a deafening sonic boom. An entire city pulverized in seconds. Thus began the nuclear age. Today, 80 years ...

Stenger, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii, argues in this quick philosophical treatise and history of atomic theory that the existence of the atom proves that God doesn’t ...

The movie “Oppenheimer,” telling the story of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped develop the process of controlled nuclear fission and later was put on trial for treason as a ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Werner Heisenberg, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, played a central role in Germany’s atomic bomb program during WWII. But a scientific mistake he made effectively derailed Germany ...

The 1945 Trinity test produced heat 10,000 times greater than the surface of the sun and spread fallout across the country. Tina Cordova and her mother, Rosalie, relax at Bonito Lake, New Mexico, in ...