Lauding Lise Meitner, Who Said ‘No’ to the Atomic Bomb

In her jaw-dropping 2013 book Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk. The American understanding of the risks people ran when they came into contact with radiation may have been weaker than the Soviets’. The Soviet government was at least secu

Lindbergh, seeing the devastation of Europe after the German surrender, felt only revulsion for the whole of science and technology, especially aviation. The man who had been its greatest hero longed now to renounce his profession and live with nature. This was in the spring of 1945, before Hiroshima.

As Chandra later remembered, “The moral is that a certain modesty toward science always pays in the end. These people (Eddington …) terribly clever, of great intellectual ability, terribly perceptive in many ways, lost out because they did not have the modesty to say ‘I am going to learn what physics teaches me.’ They wanted to dictate how physics

“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.