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Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

I still prefer the Comic-con trailer that was posted earlier and is now dead, with its Oppenheimer quote, but I'm still excited by the new one.

You know why we aren't? We are becoming Oppenheimer more and more every day.

Ol' Willy looks like J. Oppenheimer there in the thumbnail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x39eRJA1aVU

Hmm. A lot of people seem to get *very* different reads on Feynman from watching this than I do.

I don't read him as "smug" at all. The smiling? Defense mechanism, I say. He felt regret for his part in developing the bomb, hopeful pleasure in the idea that perhaps dropping the two bombs on Japan represented a net savings in lives both among the Japanese and allied forces (an invasion would have been catastrophic), and the mish-mash of conflicting emotions makes even his incredibly gifted mind go into meltdown.

I personally don't think that any of the Manhattan Project scientists "deserved" to be blamed for deaths caused by the two bombs that were actually dropped "in anger", nor for the near-disasters of the Cold War, etc. etc. I don't think they should even have lost any sleep over their involvement in developing the weapons, but I expect that all of them did in spades.

I think a better (bit still rather unfair) place to start second-guessing things is either with President Truman for giving the executive orders, or the committee that suggested the targets of the bombs (which did include Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists along with military leaders). I have always wanted to think along the lines of:

What if we had dropped the first bomb in a remote forest, where there would have been hopefully little to no loss of human life but still plenty of evidence as to the destructive power and effective radius of the weapon? We could then have communicated with the Japanese, told them the area to inspect, and said "surrender or next time we drop the same thing somewhere that you're really not going to want us to."

Maybe that would have worked, but it is a dicey way to play the cards we had in our hand. The Japanese might have read it as a sign of weakness, it would have made for another delay before we could develop more bombs and hopefully end the war (although we already had to bluff that we had plenty to use if it came down to it), etc. So basically, now I am just glad that I have never had to and hopefully never will have to make a decision that has anywhere near the magnitude of those made by the people in charge of that whole situation. Second guessing them decades after the fact and with the benefit of hindsight and information that they didn't have access to seems rather crass.

>> ^Truckchase:

Nova Science Now on autotune. Actually seems like a nice guy.


Ya, and Oppenheimer was a man of conscience...

You know why the lawyer is crying; because the judge doesn't give a shit. The whole tone of that court is bullshit.

Now I'm going to use ad homimen against the quoted person below. Do you dislike the constitution; your comment would seem to put you in that category. This case is clear cut, the Judicial Branch in Nevada does not have the power to call that law what it is; bullshit. The balance of powers is not working, and it is clear in the judge’s tone of voice; "I wash my hands of this."

Read the 8th amendment.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Somehow I get the feeling that you would think the ultimatum imposed on Alan Turing was correct and immaculately moral. Read the following excerpt from Wikipedia. Turing’s ultimatum was chemical castration or imprisonment. Bear it in mind that this is the same era where Oppenheimer was persecuted for, what some would say, the same carelessness as Turing.

In January 1952 Turing picked up 19-year-old Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.[38]

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time,[6] and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.[39]

Turing was given a choice between imprisonment and probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections.[40] A side effect of the treatment caused him to grow breasts.

Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents,[41] because of the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, was prevented from discussing his war work.[42]

Your way of thinking is outdated, outmaneuvered and better suited for the middle ages; also misogyny doesn't suit you.

>> ^fjules:

She got sentenced for life because she refused to have her name on the sex offenders list. Basically, it's her own fault.
"wtf with the crying lawyer?"
Good reason why women can't be lawyers.

Oppenheimer pulled this exact same jape in his lab and inadvertently made the world's largest firecracker. What a guy.

>> ^gwiz665:
Now I am become meth, destroyer of girls..

Oh indeed.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Robert-Oppenheimers-thoughts-after-first-atomic-explosion

>> ^jerryku:
I'm not surprised that so few are Republican (Einstein was a Communist, and many of Oppenheimer's relatives were, too), but I wonder how many today are Libertarian-types, since so many identify as independents?
And how many are pro-democracy? I would argue that science and democracy don't really work together well. For one thing, scientists are very smart, while the majority of the human race is probably embarrassingly foolish in their eyes. So are scientists (elite eggheads) really in favor of having the unwashed masses rule the world? I gotta wonder.
A scientist libertarian party guy makes sense to me though. Free market stuff is like a form of social darwinism. Survival of the fittest. Evolution. Science. Brutal, cold, efficient, and without any silly Bible or Quran to teach hippie whatever egalitarian "love your neighbor" principles that are in there.
A scientist fascist makes sense to me, too.
I guess a scientist Communist (which was VERY popular in the past) actually makes the least amount of sense to me. The only part that makes sense is the tenet of Communism that opposes faith in God. If high #s of scientists are not religious, then I can see the appeal of Communism. But all the other aspects of Communism, which is really based on the idea of majority rule ("The People!"), seems to go against what scientists would favor. Then again, I guess convincing the world that there was no afterlife after a nuclear world-destroying war.. would be the most important thing to do for the time being. Kinda like an Ozzymandias from The Watchmen type thing.




Maybe scientists are elite egg heads, but you know who else were also elite eggheads? Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Thomas Edison, Dr. Salk, Neil Armstrong. It was American eggheads that led the way to map the human genome. Nearly everyone on tonight’s shuttle launch is a science/math geek, and all but two are American. I for one am proud that my country has produced so many eggheads.

Science has done very well under democracy, and amazingly well under American democracy. In our brief history, American scientists (or at least scientists that came to and did their best work while in America [i.e. Nikola Tesla, Alexander Bell, Wernher von Braun]) have given the world the greatest number of advances in science, medicine and technology of the modern era. It makes totally sense; a free society, where ideas and information can be easily exchanged, coupled with a healthy amount of capital from the private sector to fund research is the best environment for scientific advances.

Just because a person is not religious does not mean they would automatically find communism attractive. If everyone that didn’t believe in a god were also a communist, communism would be a lot more successful than it is. I would venture to say that a disbelief in a god is more likely to happen in the above-mentioned free and open societies as opposed to one where everyone are told what to think. Communism (at least as in the form of China, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR) is not a “majority rule” government, but one where a small, self appointed, insular group at the very top controls everything. Majority rule is, however, a tenet of democracy.