On this day in 1945 the scientists of the Manhattan Project exploded the world’s first atomic bomb, a plutonium weapon, in the Trinity Test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Cue sententious announcer: “… and the nuclear age began.”)

The Los Alamos lab opened in March, 1943, and so took slightly over two years to reach its goal. It involved eight Nobel laureates and around two thousand scientific and technical staff. Isolated on its New Mexico mesa—well worth a trip—it concentrated top theoretical physicists and their most promising apprentices, setting them to solve what was in the end chiefly an engineering problem.

As the prevalence of “a Manhattan project for” attests, a romance attends this episode, and a romance requires heroes. Beyond Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, the physicists at Los Alamos surely enjoy top scientific spot in the popular imagination. And they were such a variety of characters. Maybe you admire the archetypal lefty longhair J. Robert Oppenheimer. Possibly you enjoy the literary companionship of young Richard Feynman, the homesick kid from New York who hung a bagel over his bunk, who spent his time on the mesa playing practical jokes while wracked by his feelings for his dying wife. Or perhaps Edward Teller, who devoted himself to thinking of the next, bigger bomb—the thermonuclear weapon—and who thought nuclear energy could solve all problems, is more your kind of guy. Or the great theorist Hans Bethe, who, surrounded by his proteges, looked to Feynman like a battleship with its escorts. Or “Nicholas Baker.” Or Kenneth Bainbridge: at Trinity, Oppenheimer thought “I am become Death,” while Bainbridge said, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”

Or maybe I. I. Rabi, who declined Oppenheimer’s invitation to direct a portion of the work at Los Alamos—was a bomb, Rabi asked, to be the “culmination of three centuries of physics”?—but who went to see the test at Trinity, anyway, and shared in the jubilant celebration.

Of course, whichever of those characters particularly interests you says as much about you as it does about them.