Manhattan Project**² ( a pre-flection? )

Not even back at school for a week and here we are again, courtesy of Humanities and the Manhattan Project Project. This post is meant to serve as a reflection on what things I know ( admittedly few ), and a preview of where this project might go, and my intentions in that.

In the last few days we’ve taken a brief look at the details of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Though the book Hiroshima, some independent research to create zettles, and everything I happened to come across before now, this is roughly what I know:

Sometime in the 1930s scientists started to theorize how the energy from the splitting of atoms could be harnessed. Fears of Germany developing nuclear weapons drove the United States to create the Manhattan project. In 1945 the first atomic bomb was detonated in the “Trinity” test. A month later, two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This lead to a combined 200,000 fatalities, and extensive damage. The effectiveness of atom bombs was proven beyond any doubt, and the war ended soon afterwards.

So far, I’ve only done some research on the general timeline, as well as the specifics of the damages to the two cities:

Even with my relatively shallow depth of knowledge, it’s clear how deeply the Manhattan project effected the world we live in today. Atomic bombs changed the entire context of all warfare that followed; The research needed to create those bombs lead to modern nuclear energy, and created ethical questions that are still being discussed today.

Safe to say there’s a lot of different directions I’d be interested in taking this animation¹ such as: The rebuilding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how the bombs changed their identities as cites, how atomic bombs restructured war, or even how the manhattan project set a precedent for state-sponsored science, and standards for top-secret research.

In the research and production of my video I want to fully utilize my zettelkasten² Since this is animated, I might also need to dip my toes back into some tools like DaVinci resolve, blender, and keynote.³ Finally, we’re going to be contacting some experts in fields related to our topics and while I yet don’t know who that might me for me, I do think I’ll have to brush up on my email writing to have any chance of finding someone.

This project does have a fairly tight schedule, so I hope I’ll be able to manage my time to get this done alongside all the other work that grade 11 brings. That said, I think that with a bit of effort this will be a cool project, why else would PLP do it every year without fail?

That’s all for now, stay tuned!

— Finn