Author and scientist Jeff Colvin will give a presentation entitled “The Manhattan Project” on Sunday, Sept. 7 at 2 p.m. in the Civic Center Library Storytime Room, 1188 S. Livermore Ave. Registration is not required to attend this free program for adults.

The Manhattan Project was the top-secret U.S. government project during World War II to develop an atomic bomb. Scientist and author Jeff Colvin — who spent his career in science working with some of the veterans of the Project — presents his “insider” view of the history of the Project. He will discuss the developments in science that led up to the discovery of nuclear fission on the eve of the War, how the Project came into being, how the site for the new Lab was picked, what life was like at the Lab, what the other Project sites did, and how the world changed because of the Project’s success.

Jeff Colvin has spent most of his career as a research physicist. He is the author or co-author of nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications and the co-author of “Extreme Physics,” the book that has become the standard graduate-level textbook in the new field of physics that grew out of Cold War-era nuclear weapons development. He played a leadership role in organizing the scientists' boycott of the Soviet Union discussed in his book, “Avoiding Apocalypse,” and held an appointed position in the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. during the George H. W. Bush administration. Jeff lives part-time in Livermore, California and part-time in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with his wife, Mary Frances.