Doctor Atomic of July 16, 1945 (the day of the test). During the second act, time frequently slows down for the characters and then snaps back into reality. The opera ends in the final, prolonged moment before the bomb is detonated. Although the original commission for the opera suggested that U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," be fashioned as a 20th-century Doctor Faustus, Adams and Sellars deliberately attempted to avoid this characterization. Alice Goodman worked for two years with Adams on the project before leaving, objecting to the characterization of Edward Teller, as dictated by the original
Robert Ferguson (physicist) testing of guided missiles. General Electric at Hanford: Ferguson began his career in the nuclear field when he joined General Electric at the Hanford Site, known as the Hanford Works in 1957. He trained and worked as a reactor physicist and reactor operations supervisor at the historic B Reactor, the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor produced the plutonium used in the first nuclear detonation test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and for “The Fat Man” atomic bomb, which was dropped on Nagasaki to end World War II. Chicago Operations Office at Argonne: In 1961, Ferguson joined