The atomic scientists, the sense of wonder, and the bomb

Environmental History

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 578-613

  Fiege, Mark ^a  

^a Veterinary Dentistry and Oral Surgery   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION; NUCLEAR POWER; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY;

EID: 34548738948     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/12.3.578     Document Type: Article

References (187)

1. Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 193.
2. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of an Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), describes the origins of the modern view of mountains. John Muir, The Mountains of California (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), originally published in 1894, is a prominent work that emphasizes the wonder, delight, and beauty of mountains rather than the terror typical of the classic sublime as described by Nicolson.
3. Mark Harvey, Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 46-47, quotation on 253.
4. Although the term nuclear has become conventional and is more scientifically precise, people did speak of the atomic bomb or the atomic scientists, and thus I have chosen to retain that idiomatic usage.
5. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1983; reprint, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), describes the origins of modern science. For overviews of nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, see George Gamow, Atomic Energy in Cosmic and Human Life: Fifty Years of Radioactivity (New York: Macmillan, 1947);
6. and Lawrence Badash, Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons: From Fission to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1939-1963 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). For discussions of instrumental reason and its consequences, see Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 54-58;
7. and Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 219-55.
8. Werner Heisenberg, "Quantum Theory and Its Interpretation," in Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as Seen by His Friends and Colleagues, ed. Stefan Rozental (New York: Interscience Publishers, 1964), 94-95, quotation on 95. Oppenheimer contrasted Paul A. M. Dirac's mathematical approach to thinking and communicating with Bohr's verbal method. J. Robert Oppenheimer, interview by Thomas S. Kuhn, November 20, 1963, 1, Niels Bohr Library, Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NBL).
9. Paul A. M. Dirac, The Development of Quantum Theory (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1971), 13-14, 19;
10. Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 163. See also Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, "The Pursuit of Science," Minerva 22 (1984): 410-20.
11. Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930: 1-4, in Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 39-43, quotations on 41, 42;
12. Henry Margenau, "Einstein's Conception of Reality," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1951), 249; Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006), 61-62;
13. Abraham Pais, Einstein Lived Here (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 186. See also Einstein's insightful discussion of wonder in "Autobiographical Notes," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 8-11;
14. Isidor Rabi's thoughts on the same topic in Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann, The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 59-61;
15. Ken Wilber's Quantum Questions: The Mystical Writings of the Great Physicists (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), which argues that "wonderment" (p. xii) moved the atomic scientists beyond quantum physics toward an awareness of ultimate reality; and Freeman Dyson, "The Scientist As Rebel," in Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision, ed. John Cornwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10 in which the author observes that "the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a fleeting glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature." On Einstein's indirect relationship to the bomb, see Andrew Robinson, Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), 191-96.
16. On the history of wonder and the Enlightenment emphasis on mechanical objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 13-20, 303-68;
17. Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 81-128; Lorraine Daston, "Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective," Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597-618;
18. Lorraine Daston, "Enlightenment Calculations," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 182-202;
19. and Bruce Bower, "Objective Visions: Historians Track the Rise and Times of Scientific Objectivity," Science News 154 (5 December 1998): 360. The work of Daston and Park is one of the more prominent expositions of a recent scholarly trend; see also, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, "Wonder," American Historical Review 102 (February 1997): 1-26. Wonder has close ties to the sublime. For one of the classic treatments, see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin Books, 2004), a reprint of the book's second edition, published in 1759. For a more recent version, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994);
20. J. F. Carlson and J. R. Oppenheimer, "On Multiplicative Showers," Physical Review 51 (15 February 1937): 220-31, is a typical scientific paper.
21. Peter Gallison, "Objectivity is Romantic," American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 47, 1 May 1999, at http://www.acls.org/ op47-3.htm;
22. and Werner Heisenberg, "The Idea of Nature in Contemporary Physics," in The Physicist's Conception of Nature (1958; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 7-31, suggest the limitations of objectivity and the need for creative thought outside conventional methods. Freeman Dyson contends that a reductively mathematical approach leads to intellectual sterility. See his discussion in "The Scientist As Rebel," 5-8.
23. According to Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 114, "we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself."
24. See, for example, Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," 8-11. The expression of wonder in popular science continues; notable examples include, among many other titles, Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (New York: Random House, 1979), especially 137-46;
25. and Lawrence M. Krauss, Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth ⋯ and Beyond (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), especially 285-86.
26. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 42 (quotation), 45. Carson's essay first appeared as "Help Your Child to Wonder," Woman's Home Companion (July 1956): 25-27, 46-48, 89. Carson was only one among many biologists and nature writers to address the theme. Charles Darwin (1809-1882), for example, wrote eloquently of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" in The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1985), 435-60 (quotation on 460) and passim. See also, for example, Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York Norton, 1992);
27. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Reenchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);
28. and Thomas Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 14-41.
29. Although Carson's concept emphasized living things, she acknowledged that forms of nonliving nature, such as stars and constellations, also inspired the sense of wonder. See Carson, Sense of Wonder, 54-55. Stars and constellations, of course, were the very sorts of nonliving physical phenomena that also evoked wonder in the atomic scientists. Conversely, for a famous physicist's expression of wonder at earthworms, weeds, insects, and other quotidian forms of nature, see Peter A. Bucky, The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), 15. Carson suggested that affinity for nature, especially living nature, was innate. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), centers on a similar conviction, as articulated by Wilson.
30. On this point see Werner Heisenberg, "The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences," in Across the Frontiers, 182.
31. J. Samuel Walker, "Recent Literature on Truman's Atomic Bomb Decision: The Search for a Middle Ground," Diplomatic History 29 (April 2005): 311-34, a historiographical treatment of one important part of the literature on the bomb, suggests the field's overall depth and complexity. For the standard account of the history of physics in the United States, see Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1977; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
32. John Wills, "'Welcome to the Atomic Park': American Nuclear Landscapes and the 'Unnaturally Natural,'" Environment and History 7 (2001): 449-72;
33. Matthew W. Klingle "Plying Atomic Waters: Lauren Donaldson and the 'Fern Lake Concept' of Fisheries Management," Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 1-32;
34. Peter B. Hales, "The Atomic Sublime," American Studies 32 (Spring 1991): 5-31.See also, for example, Michael Amundsen, "Mining the Grand Canyon to Save It: The Orphan Lode Uranium Mine and National Security," Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 2001): 320-46.
35. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 172;
36. William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), 23;
37. Niels Blaedel, Harmony and Unity: The Life of Niels Bohr (1985; reprint, Madison, Wisconsin and Berlin: Science Tech Publishers and Springer-Verlag, 1988), 145-46;
38. Jeremy Bernstein, "Physicist-II: I.I. Rabi," New Yorker, October 20, 1975, 58.
39. See also, for example, Cyril Stanley Smith, interview by Arthur Lawrence Norberg (hereafter Smith interview), September 23, 1976, 2, NBL; Oscar [sic; correct spelling Oskar] Klein, "From My Life of Physics," in From a Life of Physics, ed. International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna, Austria: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1968), 60-61;
40. McAllister Hull, Rider of the Pale Horse: A Memoir of Los Alamos and Beyond (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 1-2;
41. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005), 168-69.
42. David C. Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (New York: Pi Press, 2005), 16-17;
43. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 14-15, 21, 23;
44. Patricia Rife, Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Boston: Birkhauser, 1999), 3;
45. Jeremy Bernstein, "Physicist-I: I. I. Rabi," New Yorker, October 13, 1975, 49;
46. Linda J. Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 8. Numerical patterns and mathematical formulas aroused the sense of wonder in other youths. See, for example, Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," 8-11;
47. and Heisenberg, "The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences," 166-67.
48. Rudolf Peierls, Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 16;
49. Robert Serber, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7, 9-11. Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atom Bomb, ed. Richard Rhodes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), includes a copy of the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum.
50. Ruth Moore, Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science, and the World They Changed (New York: Knopf, 1966), 6-12;
51. Victor Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 1-9;
52. Pierre de Latil, Enrico Fermi: The Man and His Theories (1964; reprint, New York: Paul S. Eriksson, 1966), 22-23;
53. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family: My Life With Enrico Fermi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 19-20 (quotations). Similar to Fermi's experience with a top, Einstein's childhood encounter with a compass aroused his sense of wonder. "Something had to be behind things," he wrote. Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes," 9.
54. Robert Wilson, interview by Spencer Weart, May 19, 1977, 1-57 (quotations on 7, 8), NBL.
55. On the nature study movement, see Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1969; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 77-95;
56. and Cynthia Richardson, "Environmental Education," in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, vol. l, ed. Shepard Krech III, J. R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 440-45.
57. Moore, Niels Bohr, 11-12; Emilio Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion: The Autobiography of Emilio Segrè (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 15;
58. Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 11;
59. S. S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 53. Works of popular science, which had an important relationship to the nature study movement, captured the imagination of the young Albert Einstein. See Frederick Gregory, "The Mysteries and Wonders of Natural Science: Aaron Bernstein's Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbücher and the Adolescent Einstein," in Einstein: The Formative Years, 1879-1909, ed. Don Howard and John Stachel (Boston: Birkhauser, 2000), 23-41.
60. Lear, Rachel Carson, 7-21.
61. James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1993), 28-29, 396-401;
62. see also Freeman J. Dyson, "Wise Man," New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005, 6. In its advocacy of direct experience, Oppenheimer's philosophy of education resembled that of Feynman; see Oppenheimer, "Physics in the Contemporary World," in The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 96-100.
63. Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 1, 18. Compare to Carson, Sense of Wonder, 54-55, for an account of an evening she spent with a friend gazing at the night sky: "I have never seen them more beautiful: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of constellations standing out bright and clear, a błazing planet low on the horizon. Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth's atmosphere. ⋯ An experience like that, when one's thoughts are released to roam through the lonely spaces of the universe, can be shared with a child even if you don't know the name of a single star. You can still drink in the beauty, and think and wonder at the meaning of what you see."
64. Examples include Richard Feynman, Isidor Rabi, Ernest Lawrence, and Robert Wilson.
65. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 25-28, 70 (quotation).
66. Robert Oppenheimer, interview by Thomas S. Kuhn, November 18, 1963, 3, NBL. On the romance and scientific interests of mining engineers, see Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West: The Lace Boot Brigade, 1849-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 318-70.
67. Teller, Memoirs, 7, 70, 95, 132-33; David Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22, 29, 38-39;
68. Jeremy Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy (New York: Basic, 1980), 63, 64 (quotation), 72-73.
69. See, also, Fermi, Atoms in the Family, 3-4, 58; and Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 97-98, 108-09.
70. Luis Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic, 1987), 10-12, 14-15.
71. On the Sierra Club High Trips, see Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 61-67, 90-92.
72. Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 31, 37, 40-41, 43-45 (quotation on 44);
73. Franco Rasetti, interview by Judith Goodstein, February 4, 1982 (hereafter Rasetti interview), 7,13,18, 19, 29, 45, 47, California Institute of Technology Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena (hereafter Caltech Oral History); Larkin Kerwin, "Obituary: Franco Rasetti (1901-2001)," Nature, February 7, 2002, 597;
74. Photographs Franco Rasetti D1, Enrico Fermi C47, C48, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, NBL. See also, for example, Frank Oppenheimer (1912-1985), interview by Judith Goodstein, November 16, 1984, 12, Caltech Oral History; David Rittenhouse Inglis (1905-1997), interview by Steve J. Heims (herafter Inglis interview), May 9-10, 1977, 24-25, 28-29, NBL;
75. Roy Glauber, "An Excursion With Enrico Fermi, 14 July 1954," Physics Today, June 2002, 44-46. The physicist Jeremy Bernstein has written about mountain climbing and noted its popularity among members of his profession; see Ascent: Of the Invention of Mountain Climbing and Its Practice (New York: Random House, 1965), xii-xiii.
76. See also James Trefil, Meditations at 10,000 Feet: A Scientist in the Mountains (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986), xi-xiii;
77. and Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts of Relativity and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 159.
78. Blaedel, Harmony and Unity, 3-8, 144-55;
79. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 25, 39, 70-73, 80-81, 103-04;
80. Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, eds., Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 8, 10, 80-81, 126-27, 132, 142, 151, 184; Lear, Rachel Carson, 234-35, 243, 244-49, 261-65, 271, 386-90, 455-59. See also, for example, Inglis interview, 56, on Inglis's visits to Hayford's in the Field in rural New Hampshire.
81. Blaedel, Harmony and Unity, 7 (first quotation); Serber, Peace and War, 39 (second quotation); Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 81 (third quotation). See also Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, 321-22, photograph following 396, for an account of Leo Szilard's fondness for thinking out of doors, an activity that he referred to as "botching." See also Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 60, "on Bohr's remark that part of infinity seems to lie within the grasp of those who look across the sea?
82. According to one art historian and critic, "unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act." See Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2001), 14-26.
83. See also Solnit's Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994), 108-41.
84. Eugene P. Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 228. Compare to Paul Dirac, "Methods in Theoretical Physics," in From a Life of Physics, 24.
85. Teller, Memoirs, 7;
86. Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy, 8;
87. Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 7. See also Wigner, Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, 228.
88. Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 67;
89. Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist, 139;
90. Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy, 63 (quotation);
91. Nuell Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1968; reprint, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1969), 23, 61-62, 79.
92. David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker, 2000), 7-8.
93. On Einstein's love of nature, and the inspiration he often found on solitary hikes and walks in remote places, see Jamie Sayen, Einstein in America: The Scientist's Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima (New York: Crown, 1985), 3-4, 67.
94. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 76-79; Heisenberg, "Quantum Theory and Its Interpretation," 105-06;
95. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 128-31, 282-83, 321-25;
96. Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide to Science (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 380, 431-32.
97. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Nightin Times Past (New York: Norton, 2005), suggests some of the ways that night and darkness, environmental conditions largely unappreciated by historians, have shaped history. See Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1956; reprint, New York: Harcourt, 1958), 158, on Wolfgang Pauli's insight into the quantum behavior of electrons and the so-called exclusion principle, which occurred to him "during a simple promenade."
98. Reife, Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, 188-89;
99. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 257-65. Meitner's colleague Otto Hahn is credited with the discovery of fission, although Meitner and Frisch played the crucial role of theorizing and explaining the process.
100. Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 43-44; Rasetti interview, 47. For a glimpse of the connections between walking, an interest in nature at different but related spatial scales, and childhood, see the story at the end of Cyril Stanley Smith to Margaret Gowing, July 16, 1965, typescript copy, Appendix l, Smith interview, 47.
101. Aage Petersen, "The Philosophy of Niels Bohr," in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 299-310 (first quotation on 308);
102. Moore, Niels Bohr, 6-7;
103. Peter J. Bowler, The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences (New York: Norton, 1993), 172;
104. Niels Bohr, "Light and Life," in Niels Bohr, ed. French and Kennedy, 311-19 (second quotation on 319);
105. Blaedel, Harmony and Unity, 179-97;
106. Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 65-66;
107. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 131-32. According to Victor Weisskopf, Bohr "was interested in any phenomenon in nature." Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 62. See also Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934). On the early history of biophysics, see Brenda Maddox, "Before Watson and Crick," http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova /photo51/ before.html.
108. Robinson, Einstein, 72;
109. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 61;
110. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 78 (quotations), 105-106.
111. See Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 247-62, for the discovery of fission and the wonderment that it inspired in Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch (quotations on 253, 257, 258, 261, 262);
112. Otto Frisch, "The Interest is Focussing on the Atomic Nucleus," in Niels Bohr, 145 (Bohr quotation).
113. Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 12 (Weiskopf quotation);
114. Bernstein, "Physicist-I: I. I. Rabi," 50 (Rabi first quotation);
115. John Rigden, "Isidor Isaac Rabi: Walking the Path of God," Physics World 12 (November 1999) (Rabi second quotation) at http: // physicsweb.org/articles/world/12/11/9/1;
116. John Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen (New York: Basic, 1987), 20; Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 35-36.
117. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 571-72;
118. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 90-91, 99-102, 373-75 (first quotation on 373);
119. James Gleick, "Fallout," Washington Post, April 10, 2005 (second quotation).
120. Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, 58-59 (quotation); Hans Bethe, "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 14 (December 1958): 426-28. "What is it about [this attraction of] physics?" an interviewer asked Hedy Bretscher, who replied that nuclear physics in the early 1930s was a branch of "natural philosophy" requiring "the approach of the philosopher. I can't see any other motivation for doing nuclear physics than wanting to know about things without any other practical motive." Hedy Bretscher, interview by John Bennett and Anna Shepherd, June 21, 1984, 1, NBL. See also David Inglis's explanation of his movement in the mid-1930s from the study of atomic spectra to the study of the nucleus-"the thing that was most fascinating and least understood is always the most attractive"-and his comments about the scientists' dedication to "understanding the secrets of nature." Inglis interview, 37-38, 54. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 105: "It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions." On the accretion of knowledge necessary to build a bomb, see Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 13-275.
121. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 166-68 (quotation on 166).
122. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 168-97, 303-14; Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 187-88, 209, 221, 268;
123. DeGroot, The Bomb, 14.
124. For example, Pierels, Bird of Passage, 189; Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy, 80; Segrè, Enrico Fermi Physicist, 133. Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 3-80, surveys the town's development; Hal Rothman, On Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 207-32, surveys the town's development in relation to the local environment.
125. Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos (Los Alamos: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1997), 6, 10, 11, 15.
126. Ferenc Morton Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 33;
127. Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 181;
128. Robert R. Wilson, "A Recruit for Los Alamos," in All in Our Time: The Reminiscences of Twelve Nuclear Pioneers, ed. Jane Wilson (Chicago: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1975), 151 (quotation).
129. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 451, 540, 543, 567;
130. Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (1993; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 228-233;
131. Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 186 (quotation).
132. George B. Kistiakowsky, "Reminiscences of Los Alamos," in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945, ed. Lawrence Badash, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, and Herbert P. Broida (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980), 61 (quotation); "Sawyer's Hill Ski Tow Association," The Daily Bulletin, November 10, 1944, and "Plans for Ski Tow Developed," Los Alamos Times, 8 November 1946, both in Los Alamos: The First Fifty Years, ed. Fern Lyon and Jacob Evans (Los Alamos: Los Alamos Historical Society), 1984), 22, 91.
133. Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 220-24;
134. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, 224-25 (quotations on 225).
135. Goodchild, Edward Teller, 77 (quotation);
136. Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project, 33-34;
137. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 225;
138. Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion, 142-43,180, 190-93;
139. Smith and Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, 253-54.
140. Joseph O. Hirschfelder, "The Scientific and Technological Miracle at Los Alamos," in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, ed. Badash, et al., 80 (first quotation), 81 (third quotation);
141. Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project, 34 (second quotation);
142. Otto R. Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 152-53;
143. Herbert L. Anderson, "Assisting Fermi," in All in Our Time, ed. Wilson, 99;
144. Gleick, Genius, 169-70, 182; Conant, 109 East Palace, 256;
145. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 549. On Conant's mountaineering enthusiasm, see James B. Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 194-204.
146. Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 60-61;
147. Gleick, Genius, 437 (quotation). Feynman's observation resembled Bohr's theory of complementarity. See Blaedel, Harmony and Unity, 180.
148. Gleick, Genius, 173;
149. Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 132-39 (quotations on 133, 137). On the tangled relationship between the pursuit of pure knowledge and the practical problem of building the bomb, see, for example, Robert Oppenheimer, "Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists," November 2, 1945, in Smith and Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, 315-25; Inglis interview, 53-54;
150. Hans Bethe, "Energy on Earth and in the Stars," in From a Life of Physics, 15-16;
151. Hans A. Bethe and Robert Christy, "Oppie's Colleagues Affirm His Leadership in Manhattan Project," Physics Today 53 (June 2000): 15;
152. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 121-22, 183-85, 213-20.
153. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 127-30 (quotation 130); Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 127-129; compare to Serber, Los Alamos Primer, xxxi.
154. See also Szasz, Day the Sun Rose Twice, 58;
155. Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: DaCapo, 1962, 1983), 296-97;
156. Leslie Groves, "Memorandum for the Secretary of War," in American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 1939-1984, ed. Robert C. Williams and Philip L. Cantelon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 51;
157. Leslie Groves, "Some Recollections of July 16, 1945," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 26 (June 1970): 26.
158. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 209-12, 287-314 (quotation on 296);
159. Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, vol. l, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), ix-xii, 3-36;
160. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 657. On terror, fear, darkness, and dread, see Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 101-07.
161. Szasz, Day the Sun Rose Twice, 40-41;
162. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 304;
163. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 571-72;
164. Robert M. Torrance, ed., Encompassing Nature: Nature and Culture from Ancient Times to the Modern World (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 141-48. Or, in the words of Hans Bethe, "stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live." Hans Bethe, "Energy Production in Stars," Physics Today 21 (September 1968): 44.
165. Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, 198-99 (first quotation); Inglis interview, 54;
166. George B. Kistiakowsky, "Trinity-A Reminiscence," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 36 (June 1980): 21-22 (second quotation); Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, 233.
167. The quotations appear in Szasz, Day the Sun Rose Twice, 89; Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 673; Inglis interview, 55; Weisskopf, Joy of Insight, 152.
168. Harvey, Wilderness Forever, 46;
169. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), especially 196-210, 266-74;
170. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; reprint, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 6, 234;
171. Carson, Sense of Wonder, 45 (quotation).
172. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 323-33;
173. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 749-51;
174. Greg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 139-42;
175. Bernard T. Feld, "The Nagasaki Binge," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 22 February 1966): 35-37;
176. Glenn T. Seaborg, Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 200l), 118-24. Among many others, Samuel Allison (1900-1965), Hans Bethe, James Conant, Albert Einstein, Bernard Feld (1919-1993), James Franck (1882-1964), George Kistiakowsky, Lise Meitner, Philip Morrison (1915-2005), Robert Oppenheimer, Isidor Rabi, Eugene Rabinowitch (1901-1973), Franco Rasetti, Josef Rotblat (1908-2005), Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner objected to one or another of the bomb's manifestations. Although no single source covers the full range of the scientists' reactions, see Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), and Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, vol. 1, One World or None. See also, for example, Richard L. Garwin and Kurt Gottfried, "Hans in War and Peace," Physics Today 58 (October 2005): 52-57;
177. Robert R. Wilson, "The Conscience of a Physicist," in Alamagordo Plus Twenty-Five Years, ed. Richard S. Lewis and Jane Wilson (New York: Viking 1971), 67-76;
178. Mary Palevsky, Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 125-50;
179. Roger Segelken, "Robert R. Wilson, Physicist and Particle Accelerator Designer, Dies at 85," Cornell News, January 20, 2000, at http:// www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/00/1.20.00 /Wilson_obit.html. Even Edward Teller, who became the most enthusiastic, unapologetic, infamous proponent of the bomb, at first doubted it and supported its control through "world government." See Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 765-66.
180. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, With Essays on Conservation from Round River (1966; reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 116-19, 137-45, 226-33, 237-64 (quotations on 117, 118, 137, 138, 240).
181. This is not to deny important personal, disciplinary, and philosophical differences between Leopold and the atomic scientists. Yet in his critique of war, militarism, machines, and "power-science," in the psychological depression that he experienced in the aftermath of the bomb, in his belief that the bomb made war unwinnable, and in his view of God and religion, Leopold shared much with Einstein, Oppenheimer, Wilson, and other atomic scientists. Historians have yet to examine fully the similarities between figures such as Leopold and the atomic scientists, including similar moral and ethical struggles. See Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 473, 482-83, 506-07, for Leopold's reaction to the bomb and his views of God and religion. On Leopold's reaction to war and militarism, and his depressed emotional reaction to the bomb, see the reminiscences of Carl and Luna Leopold, two of his children, in Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy, ed. Thomas Tanner (Ankeny, Iowa: Soil and Water Conservation Society, 1995), 174-75.
182. See also Heisenberg's statement in 1958 that science had become "focused on the network of relationships between man and nature, on the framework which makes us as living beings dependent parts of nature," in "The Idea of Nature in Contemporary Physics," 29.
183. For Oppenheimer's reactions, see Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 532-33, 642, 750-51, 758;
184. and Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 313-35, 418-23, 426-27, 429-31, 444-45, 451, 465.
185. Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), offers an interpretation of Oppenheimer and the atomic scientists that contrasts with the point that I develop in this and the preceding two paragraphs.
186. "The past," the critic Paul Fussell has written, "which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that deserve to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified." Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and other Essays (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 22.
187. See also, for example, the remarkable reinterpretation by Palevsky in Atomic Fragments, 238-41.