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though nuclear weapons are the property of individual nation-states, which claim the right to hold and to use them in defense of national sovereignty, in their indiscriminate destructiveness they are a common danger to all, like an epidemic disease, and like an epidemic disease they transcend national borders, disputes, and ideologies.
To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth.
Physics students at that time wandered Europe in search of exceptional masters much as their forebears in scholarship and craft had done since medieval days.
we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.
“The Order,” Szilard wrote at a different time, “was not supposed to be something like a political party . . . but rather it was supposed to represent the state.”
TECHNOCRACY, but inherently elitist
that his scientist hero, for example, was “oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his discovery.
noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war.71
This vision of increasing disorder means that the universe is one-way and not reversible; the second law is the expression in physical form of what we call time. But the equations of mechanical physics—of what is now called classical physics—theoretically allowed the universe to run equally well forward or backward.
that atoms were not then directly accessible to experiment.
We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.
Science, Polanyi was hinting, worked like a giant brain of individual intelligences linked together. That was the source of its cumulative and seemingly inexorable power. But the price of that power, as both Polanyi and Feynman are careful to emphasize, is voluntary limitation.
and kindly told him he could not serve God and Mammon at the same time.
That, says Soddy, “conveyed the tremendous and inevitable conclusion that the element thorium was slowly and spontaneously transmuting itself into [chemically inert] argon gas!”
finally alchemy five hundred years after gold experiments
“some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares.” If atomic energy would never be useful, it might still be dangerous.
SCREAMING CRYING OPPIE YOU WHORE
Rutherford’s experiments still stun with their simplicity.157 “In this Rutherford was an artist,” says a former student. “All his experiments had style.”
“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life,” he said later. “It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.
As earnest of his commitment to female emancipation Christian Bohr taught review classes to prepare women for university study.
If men wanted to they would
The literal child saw the wholeness of the organism and dissented: if it wasn’t like that, he said, it wouldn’t be a tree.
If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged. The trouble is that stalling postpones the confrontation and adds that guilt to the burden. Anxiety increases; the mechanism accelerates its spiraling flights; the self feels as if it will fragment;
advanced form of procrastination?
“His leading idea was that the different possible conceptions of life are so sharply opposed to one another that we must make a choice between them, hence his catchword either-or;
Rutherford’s qualities “the patience to listen to every young man when he felt he had any idea, however modest, on his mind.”
“There is nothing in the world which impresses a physicist more,” an American physicist comments, “than a numerical agreement between experiment and theory, and I do not think that there can ever have been a numerical agreement more impressive than this one, as I can testify who remember its advent.”281
Mechanistic physics had become authoritarian. It had outreached itself to claim universal application, to claim that the universe and everything in it is rigidly governed by mechanistic cause and effect.
To identify a kind of freedom of choice within the atom itself was a triumph for his carefully assembled structure of beliefs.
not a grand philosophical system of authoritarian command but simply a way, in his favorite phrase, of “asking questions of Nature.”286
“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
More strategically, the Haber process would be invaluable in time of war to produce nitrates for explosives; Germany had no nitrates of its own.
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.
When I objected that this was a mode of warfare violating the Hague Convention 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.
ends and means for terrible new scientific weapon
The Germans sometimes chose to disguise mustard with xylyl bromide, a tear gas that smells like lilac, and so it came to pass in the wartime spring that men ran in terror from a breeze scented with blossoming lilac shrubs.
Germany, always logical at war to the point of inhumanity, blamed the French and courted a succession of increasingly desperate breakthroughs. The chemists, like bargain hunters, imagined they were spending a pittance of tens of thousands of lives to save a purseful more.
but capitulated in the name of parity.
Haber told her what he had told Hahn, adding for good measure, patriot that he was, that a scientist belongs to the world in times of peace but to his country in times of war.352 Then he stormed out to supervise a gas attack on the Eastern Front. Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.
“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.”
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.
Its pessimism resides in its dramatic strategy. Lucifer demonstrates to Adam the pointlessness of man’s faith in progress by staging not imaginary experiences, as in Faust or Peer Gynt, but real historical events.
Teller was bored in first-year math at the Minta and quickly managed to insult his mathematics teacher, who was also the principal of the school, by improving on a proof. The principal took the classroom display unkindly. “So you are a genius, Teller? Well, I don’t like geniuses.”
my god he started early
“The Revolution arrived as a hurricane,” an eyewitness to the Hungarian Revolution of October 1918 recalls. “No one prepared it and no one arranged it; it broke out by its own irresistible momentum.”
if you tried to buy it with the regime’s ration cards and nearly worthless paper money, but for some reason the same paper would purchase an abundance of Commune-sponsored vanilla ice cream, which his family therefore consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
????????
That science can be a refuge from the world is a conviction common among men and women who turn to
But external circumstance is no sure measure of internal wounding, and there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.
At dinner the next evening Bohr was startled to be challenged by two young men in the uniforms of the Göttingen police. One of them clapped him on the shoulder: “You are arrested on the charge of kidnapping small children!” They were students, genial frauds.438 The small child they guarded was Heisenberg, boyish with freckles and a stiff brush of red hair.
In the summer of 1921 a wealthy seventeen-year-old American student, a recent graduate of the Ethical Culture School of New York,
BABYGIRL IS HERE
he was still unformed enough to brave no more than worshiping older women from afar.
j robert oppenheimer milf enjoyer??
is that more difficult for Americans than for Europeans like Szilard or Teller, who seem all of a piece from their earliest days?—and
no tbh its likely bc oppie was a sheltered nyc trust fund kid and teller witnessed antisemitic reactionary violence first hand
I hardly took an action, hardly did anything or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper in physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.”
and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.
HE WOULD DO NUMBERS ON TWITTER
I told him and he said, ‘How is it going?’ I said, ‘I’m in difficulties.’ He said, ‘Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘That’s bad.’ ”
very miserable German mood . . . bitter, sullen, and, I would say, discontent and angry and with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster.
