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January 8 - January 24, 2025
“Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome.
“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.
This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”
“The authority of scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.”
“It is wrong,” he told his colleagues repeatedly, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is”—which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”290
Chaim Weizmann’s experience was an early and instructive
example of the power of science in time of war. Government took note. So did science.
he said that the French had already started it—though not to much effect—by using rifle-ammunition filled with gas. Besides, it was a way of saving countless lives, if it meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner.
By 1918 a typical artillery barrage locomoting east or west over the front lines counted nearly as many gas shells as high-explosive.
Folkestone was the little Guernica of the Great War. German Gotha bombers—oversized biplanes—had attacked England for the first time, bringing with them the burgeoning concept of strategic bombing.
A Zeppelin bombed Antwerp early in the war as the Germans pushed through Belgium. Churchill sent Navy
fighters to bomb Zeppelin hangars at Düsseldorf. Gothas bombed Salonika and a British squadron bombed the fortress town of Maidos in the Dardanelles during the campaign for Gallipoli. But the Gothas that attacked Folkestone in 1917 began the first effective and sustained campaign of strategic civilian bombardment.
The Germans bombed to establish “a basis for peace” by destroying “the morale of
the English people” and paralyzing their “will to fight.”363 They succeeded in making the British mad enough to think strategic bombing through.
Of a total of some 21 million battle casualties gas caused perhaps 5 percent, about 1 million.
Men cried out against the monstrousness on all sides.
The machine gun was less mutilating but far more efficient, the basic slaughtering tool of the war.
The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were only proximately the mechanism
of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization—anachronistically speaking, a software package.
“The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”
Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a “strategy of attrition.”
Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller.
Niels Bohr wrote the German theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich in April 1922, “I have often felt myself scientifically very lonesome, under the impression that my effort to develop the principles of the quantum theory systematically to the best of my ability has been received with very little understanding.”
Aston goes on in this lecture, delivered in 1936, to speculate about the social consequences of that energy release.
There are those about us who say that such research should be stopped by law, alleging that man’s destructive powers are already large enough. So, no doubt, the more elderly and ape-like of our prehistoric ancestors objected to the innovation of cooked food and pointed out the grave dangers attending the use of the newly discovered agency, fire. Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively
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Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously,
this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.
Hitler pathologically feared and hated the Jews. In black megalomania he masked an intelligent, industrious and much-persecuted people with the distorted features of his own terror. And that would make all the difference.
Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
When a neutron enters a nucleus, the effects are about as catastrophic as if the moon struck the earth. The nucleus is violently shaken up by the blow, especially if the collision results in the capture of the neutron. A large increase in energy occurs and must be dissipated, and this may happen in a variety of ways, all of them interesting.
Leo Szilard
“The discoveries of scientists,” he wrote, “have given weapons to mankind which may destroy our present civilization if we do not succeed in avoiding further wars.”
We were working very hard on the neutron-induced radioactivity and the results we were obtaining made no sense.
If they seem
less perceptive in their skepticism than Szilard, they also had a better grasp of the odds. The essential future is always unforeseen. They were experienced enough not to long for it.
there were signs of infection, deadly in those days before antibiotics.
Rutherford was the Newton of atomic physics.
We worked with incredible stubbornness. We would begin at eight in the morning and take measurements
almost without a break, until six or seven in the evening, and often later.
Fermi’s circle repeated the verse passed around the city by word of mouth by which an indignant Roman poet greeted the Nazi dictator: Rome of travertine splendor Patched with cardboard and plaster Welcomes the little housepainter As her next lord and master.
To a greater extent than any other scientist of the twentieth century Bohr perceived the institution of science to which he dedicated his life to be a profoundly political force in the world. The purpose of science, he believed, was to set men free. Totalitarianism, in Hannah Arendt’s powerful image, drove toward “destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other.”
They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out.
The same week a young physicist working at Hamburg, Paul Harteck, wrote a letter jointly with his assistant to the German War Office: We take the liberty of calling to your attention the newest development in nuclear physics, which, in our opinion, will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones. . . . That country which first makes use of it has an unsurpassable advantage over the others.
Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.
I remember the spring of 1941 to this day. I realized then that a nuclear bomb was not only possible—it was inevitable.
And I had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy. I’ve never stopped since then. It’s 28 years, and I don’t think I’ve missed a single night in all those 28 years.
Every man owed his authority to the President. Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself. Thus at the outset of the U.S. atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build.
Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism.
The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression. The race was therefore not merely against Germany. As Roosevelt apparently sensed, the race was against time.
