Making of the Atomic Bomb

“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 removin

H. G. Wells’ books that he had failed to discover before: The World Set Free.63 Despite its title, it was not a tract like The Open Conspiracy. It was a prophetic novel, published in 1914, before the beginning of the Great War.

Beneficent intention in this instance is a document proposing a new organization: Der Bund—the order, the confederacy, or, more simply, the band.52

“Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries.

In the middle years of my life I lived on four acres of land in Connecticut, a meadow completely enclosed within a forested wildlife preserve.

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 Voice of the Dolphins”: