The alien hypothesis?

[John Doe]

yes..I have him speaking those words on video tape on
another Nova special  "The Best Mind Since
Einstein"...he essentially said that yes he felt what
he did immorally was not to question the reason for
the bomb once Germany had been defeated...he said "I
simply didn't THINK, o.k?"...they were caught up in
completing this task they were assigned..and I'm not
apologizing for them, but at least some of them, esp.
Oppenheimer -definitely not Teller! - deeply regretted
working on it...so much for the "cold, unfeeling "
scientist...

--- Blake Stacey <blake.stacey at ens-lyon.fr> wrote:

> Quoting jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net>:
> 
> >
> > What were Feynman's feelings, if any, about the
> development
> > of the atomic bomb and its being dropped on
> hundreds of thousands
> > of civilians? Or doesn' t that image intrude
> through the "faintly
> > falling" snow at MIT?
> >
> 
> He joined the Manhattan Project while doing his
> doctoral work at 
> Princeton. Initially, he was reluctant, but fear of
> the alternative got 
> him to join. Quoting roughly from memory, **Surely
> You're Joking, Mr. 
> Feynman!** says, "The
> Germans had Hitler, and the possibility of a bomb
> was obvious."  Like many of
> the Los Alamos scientists (perhaps the majority of
> them), he joined because of
> the German threat.  In a filmed interview, which is
> transcribed in the volume
> **No Ordinary Genius**, he says that "what I did
> immorally" was failing to
> reconsider the situation after Germany fell and if
> Japan represented a similar
> threat -- a threat frightening enough to warrant the
> Bomb.
> 
> Again, I have to quote from memory, but in the same
> interview, he talks about
> the elation which spread through Los Alamos after
> the Trinity test was a
> success.  He ran around playing drums and dancing on
> the hood of a Jeep, and
> everyone else was about as enthusiastic.  At the
> same time, "people were
> suffering and dying in Hiroshima."
> 
> After Trinity, he wrote that "everything was perfect
> except the aim.  The next
> one was aimed at Japan instead of New Mexico" (a
> letter to his mother, 
> I think,
> included in Gleick's biography).
> 
> Whether or not the Bomb should have been made or,
> once made, dropped 
> upon Japan
> is of course a vast subject with no clear
> resolution.  Nevertheless, it is a
> considerable part of why, as Gleick says,
> "physicists did not make natural
> hippies."
> 
> Blake
> 
> 
> 



		
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