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March 27, 2019 - September 8, 2020
“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 of how to release nuclear energy, like all fundamental scientific discoveries, changed the structure of human affairs—permanently.
It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.
because only through the liberation of atomic energy could we obtain the means which would enable man not only to leave the earth but to leave the solar system.
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.”
“no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestioningly accepted.”
“Physics,” as Eugene Wigner once reminded a group of his fellows, “does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us—it gives information about the correlations between those events.”108
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.
Abraham Pais remarks that Einstein “once commented that he had sold himself body and soul to science, being in flight from the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ to the ‘it.’ ”
In 1519 coins were first struck from its silver at his command. Joachimsthaler, the name for the new coins, shortened to thaler, became “dollar” in English before 1600. Thereby the U.S. dollar descends from the silver of Joachimsthal.
“Not only do wars create incredible suffering, but they engender deep hatreds that can last for generations.”
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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To all these emotional troublings—Oppenheimer’s and Lawrence’s, as Bohr’s and others’ before and since—science offered an anchor: in discovery is the preservation of the world.
Hans Bethe once remarked that
he considered everything before 1932 “the prehistory of nuclear physics, and from 1932 on the history of nuclear physics.”603 The difference, he said, was the discovery of the neutron.
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.
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.
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.
You who are scientists may have been told that you are in part responsible for the debacle of today . . . but I assure you that it is not the scientists of the world who are responsible. . . . What has come about has been caused solely by those who would use, and are using, the progress that you have made along lines of peace in an entirely different cause.
anticipation and discovery can cut that close in science.1380
The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.
the United States must also be pursuing a program when the names of prominent physicists, chemists, metallurgists and mathematicians disappeared from international journals: secrecy itself gave the secret away.1907
The bomb was opportunity and threat and would always be opportunity and threat—that was the peculiar, paradoxical hopefulness.
The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future conditions of warfare.”2025 When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war.
Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark
light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change.
It was a mechanism that nations could build and multiply that harnessed unlimited energy, a mechanism that many nations would build in self-defense as soon as they learned of its existence and acquired the technical means. It would seem to confer security upon its builders, but because there would be no sure protection against so powerful and portable a mechanism, in the course of time each additional unit added to the stockpiles would decrease security by adding to the general threat until insecurity finally revealed itself to be total at every hand.
Total security would be indistinguishable from total insecurity.
Before the bomb, international relations had swung between war and peace. After the bomb, major war among nuclear powers would be self-defeating. No one could win.
The pendulum now would swing wider: between peace and national suicide; between peace and total death.
“It appeared to me,” Bohr wrote in 1950 of his lonely wartime initiative, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.”2026 That, in a single sentence, was the revelation of the complementarity of the bomb.
“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make
him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”
It was not impersonal for Robert Lewis. “If I live a hundred years,”
he wrote in his journal, “I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”2597 Nor would the people of Hiroshima.2598
In my mind’s eye, like a waking dream, I could still see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men.
Only the living, however inundated, can describe the dead; but where death claimed nine out of ten or, closer to the hypocenter, ten out of ten, a living voice describing necessarily distorts. Survivors are like us; but the dead are radically changed, without voice or civil rights or recourse. Along with their lives they have been deprived of participation in the human world.
“There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,”
Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages,
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