American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Manhattan Project had achieved exactly what Rabi had feared it would achieve—it had made a weapon of mass destruction “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” And in doing so, he thought, the project had impoverished physics, and not just in a metaphysical sense; and soon he began to disparage it as a scientific achievement. “We took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it,” Oppenheimer told a Senate committee in late 1945, “and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known.” The war had “a notable effect on physics,” he said. “It practically stopped it.” He soon came to believe that during the war we “perhaps witnessed a more total cessation of true professional activity in the field of physics, even in its training, than [in] any other country.” But the war also had focused attention on science. As Victor Weisskopf later wrote: “The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”