All sources are quoted for purposes of review only, don’t sue me.
I found out too late that Amazon does not show the publisher on the first page of the description or I missed it. I’ll put in proper provenance later.
by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin
I was sitting in a café in London, in 1967, when I heard the news of Oppenheimer’s death. Later, getting a degree in physics, I would learn more of his life.
This book shows Robert Oppenheimer as a great genius who was ADD, arrogant, loving, a man of great works, and insufficiently paranoid. The book takes the reader past the many physicists of Oppenheimer’s day and shows the action from the American side.
Oppenheimer was a man who could run the Manhattan project, but who usually said the wrong thing when talking to the president of the United States.
One stark lesson of this book is that soon after fission weapons were used on Japan, our military and our government had already started planning for their further use. The moral qualms and political dreams of scientists soon became irrelevant.
Oppenheimer was probably ADD. He had a difficult time settling down in his early career, until he immersed himself in quantum theory. Even then, it was remarked that he didn’t have sitzfleisch. He started many investigations, but left them for others to develop.
He also changes his very persona at least three times in his career: shifting out of confusion to quantum mechanics (is that an oxymoron?), becoming a brilliant lecturer and scientist, and becoming the man who developed the atom bomb.
Oppenheimer lacked enough paranoia to see that his government could turn him into a scapegoat a few years after he brought the first fission bomb to it. Einstein thot him a fool for submitting to such investigations in hopes of reinstatement. Einstein had seen nations contorted with fear and hate before.
This book documents in detail, Oppenheimer’s tribunal and his strange occasional lies which made the witch hunter’s job easier. Edward Teller testified, saying that Oppenheimer was too “complicated” to have such great responsibility. This pseudo-psychiatry was accepted as a good argument. Before the results of the tribunal were shown to President Eisenhower, they were changed from the actual conclusions.
President Eisenhower could have spoken up against McCarthy and did not have to let the FBI harass mere lefties or deal illegally with avowed Communists. His inaction shows that the government sponsored crack down on the left, that started with Truman, was top down and the official policy of our rulers.
John Adams, Composer
http://doctor-atomic.com/index.html
All quotes and much info are taken from the website above.
After reading about the Manhattan project for years, it was a thrill to see the curtain open upon the stage of LosAlamos characters with models of scientific gear behind them. The libretto comprises the actual writing of the participants and poetry (some from the Bhagavadgita, of course) .
A musician friend of mine approves of the score, but to me it mostly set the background to the action.
Imagine an opera that begins:
Matter can be neither created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.
The end of June 1945 finds us
expecting from day to day
to hear of the explosion
of the first atomic bomb
devised by man.
The opening had shock value, as the curtain goes up, the cast explains to the dark sounding music that they are building the most powerful weapon ever made. Thence to the everyday life of Los Alamos, with General Groves talking about his weight and Oppenheimer discussing the bomb with Teller. American Prometheus explains that Teller made himself almost useless in the development of the fission bomb, even as he was employed at Los Alamos by Oppenheimer.
Imagine hearing Ulam and Bethe quoted in an opera.
Imagine Oppenheimer in bed with Kitty while they read poetry.
Written by Michael Frayn
Prospect Theater, Modesto, CA
www.prospecttheaterproject.org
Feb. 3 – 26, 2006
Margrethe Bohr – Mary Pieczarka
Niels Bohr - David Hambley
Werner Heisenberg - Yancey Quiñones
Director – Heike Hambley
Before the cast arrives, we see a large chalk circle, with the equations of quantum physics and general relativity written with colored chalk within it and three high chairs.
The lights go down and the cast walks to their marks, the lights go up and we see Heisenberg on our left in front of Feynman diagrams, on our right Bohr in front Einstein’s field equations, in the background, upstage, Margrethe Bohr in front of the quantum f = ma. In the middle are the Pauli matrices.
For many years physicists have wondered, did the brilliant Heisenberg bumble Hitler’s A-bomb? What did he discuss with his old friend Bohr in 1941, away from his Gestapo minders?
Copenhagen tells the muddy waters of the story, but within the story the players debate: did Heisenberg ask Bohr, in a round about way, to bumble the Allies’ A-bomb, as he might Hitler’s?
Quiñones ‘s Heisenberg is quick and mercurial. Hambley’s Bohr is craggy, fatherly, and pounces like a bear. Pieczarka’s Margrethe is a lovely lady who again and again keeps the boys honest, while keeping the seam of her stockings straight.
Another question is taken up again and again: why didn’t Heisenberg figure out the relatively small size of the critical mass for U-235, the fissionable isotope of Uranium? He could probably do reaction cross sections in his head. If he had done this, then Speer would have approved the amount of raw materials. Did he use the wrong isotope on purpose?
Heisenberg claimed that he was working just on controlled fission.
This play is an utter delight for the physics student. Hitler didn’t get the A-bomb, so we only have Oppenheimer sized guilt.
Thanks to this play, I now know of three times that Heisenberg might have died during the war
1) At the Max Plank Institute, he put his Uranium in a steel vessel filled with water. He ran away just in time when he saw the vessel start expanding, before it blew. Uranium in contact with water generates hydrogen gas.
2) When Heisenberg gave a lecture in Switzerland, there was a British agent in the audience, with orders to shoot Heisenberg if he mentioned the bomb.
3) In the last few weeks of the war when Heisenberg fled from his reactor in Western Germany toward his home, traveling at night on a bicycle, he was stopped by the SS and accused of being a deserter, to be shot. Heisenberg thot very quickly and reached into his jacket and offered the SS officer a pack of Lucky Strikes, to save his life again.
By Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove has authored many delightful alternative histories, many as series. This book is a favorite of mine as a single contained volume, chronicling the Spanish occupation of Britain after the victory of the Armada.
Here we have a wonderful portrayal of the everyday life of alt.Shakespeare, in an accessible way that yet delivers a lot of the language of the day. It’s delightful to hear that “zany” was a current word, and delightful to hear details of the everyday life and geography of alt.London.
The Byzantine machinations of the plot to free Britain of the Spanish is worthy of the holder of a degree in Byzantine history, Turtledove, but he makes it believable thru his mastery of the details of the environment and great timing.
By Bruce Sitrling, Delrey, Ballentine Books, 2005
This book contains a great deal of spooky, computer security lore, circa 2005. Altho I’m a software engineer, I am ignorant about security and encryption, but the rest of the background of the book rings true. It is an amazing sci-fi government/nerd/spook book! I hope I am not speaking from ignorance.
As an added delight, it is very rare for sci-fi books to include lines of praise for sitting presidents, let alone:
“Somehow this was the very same guy (President Bush) as the remorseless military war chief who was relentlessly crushing the world’s most feared and respected mountain bandits (sic).”
Even Rumsfeld appears in the background. Rummy has lost day-to-day control of our occupation of Iraq to Condi, as of 2/9/06.
It is almost as rare for sci-fi books to contain succinct summaries of US foreign policy as:
“The Americans are taking over the planet by force of arms. And now, after one terrorist incident from some small cult of fanatics, the Americans feel completely justified in attacking anyone, anywhere, at anytime! And with space dominance to leverage all those other military asset, the Americans can do that.”
The book sounds technically correct for the most part (part of its great charm), but the author gets his physics wrong in the last dramatic explosion. This reader was carried along by the techie plot and hardly noticed the dissonance. It was a great ride.
By Tony Judt, The Penguin Press, 2005.
Reading in progress.
Indeed, this is a long book and very dense. It is worth while for me to read this because of how much it fills in the lacunae of my historical background. Being born in 1946, I am post war and this is the Europe that I grew up with, across the pond. How did it get here? Here are a few bullet points that intrigued me.
Britain was in worse shape than many nations, post war. It had stopped getting loans from the US and had exhausted its resources to win the war. Rationing in Britain lasted longer than for some countries on the Continent. Cf., the movie A Private Function: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/private_function/.
Divided Germany was such a potent problem, that the Allies allowed the Germans a lot of money for rebuilding and a lot of forgetting was allowed. Ex-Nazis were critical in the rebuilding of Germany.
The cold war started in 1948 when the Soviets walked out of important meetings about rebuilding Europe. Their territory had to be run on the Stalinist model, so there was no negotiation.
When I was growing up on this side of the pond, I heard a great deal of anti-Soviet propaganda. As I remember it, it seems very concerned with abstractions and slogans in retrospect. Only in my adult life, by my own efforts (not from propaganda organs), did I find out what a real monster Stalin was.
There was no choice to made between creating welfare states in Europe or laisser faire capitalism. As Judt points out, it was a choice between welfare states and the abyss.
Compared to Chomsky, Judt only touches on some points.
In Judt’s discussion of the Marshall Plan, he doesn’t mention that, especially the Italian government was warned that leaning too far to the left could affect the flow of Marshall Plan funds.
Also about Italy, Judt mentions the “militant North”, but not that the workers had the factories already running, when the Allied troops arrived.
Judt summarizes the Bretton Woods agreement, but leaves out the critical point that it also put limitations on cash flow from country to country. The US government has led the way in removing these restrictions, so that cash flight has severely damaged the economies of several smaller countries. The closest example is that of Mexico. After privatization, many new millionaires were created, but the cash flight trashed the peso and almost destroyed the middle class, due to high interest rates.
by S.M. Stirling
S.M. Stirling, like Turtledove, has written many delightful alternative history novels, including series, but this single volume particularly delighted me.
In his alt.history, meteor strikes in the 1870’s render Northern Europe almost uninhabitable due to a new, cold climate. The British government under Disraeli evacuates to India and the Raj continues till our story in 2030.
This sets the stage for characters out of Kipling. I remember reading Kipling’s Kim to my son, as a bedtime book. I probably enjoyed it more than he did. This book has the same big powers at play in The Great Game and also gets across the huge diversity and great spirit of India. Russia has fallen prey to the demonic regime of the Malik Nous, whose goal is the annihilation of the world, always a vote getter.
Stirling delivers great fight scenes and there is much sword play, some of the best staged on a sinking dirigible. The reader will be delighted to know that there is great action to follow when the air ship lands.
by Roger Penrose, Knopf, 2005.
Reading in progress, indeed, I will probably never finish reading this book and I have only enough math and physics to enjoy it greatly, not to understand it thoroughly.
This is a mammoth, beautiful introduction to quantum mechanics, general relativity, and cosmology – theoretical physics from a geometrical point of view.
One of the most interesting topics that Penrose discusses, in earlier volumes too, is the entropy of the big bang. He is one of the few pop physicists to discuss this in such great detail.
WARNING – Metaphysical leap ahead, those who haven’t believed a dozen impossible things before breakfast may be excused.
Spose that there are an infinite number of universes (as A.D. Linde does: http://www.stanford.edu/~alinde/). Penrose estimates the phase space of all of them and concludes that, given the number of baryons in our universe, number of blackholes, etc., that when She picked our universe, it was one in 10^10^23. This makes for a very low initial entropy! This and gravitation sets our direction of time.
Note that Penrose based the uniqueness of our universe, excluding biological life and consciousness, which we got. Hence the original entropy must have been very much lower. We live in a Big Blossom, coasting on entropy.
Penrose uses this book to summarize his opinions about the nature of physics (we are lucky to have him speaking to us) and he very carefully states when he is letting fly with his own opinions and warns the reader thus. E.g., he’s suspicious of inflation.
There are many elegant presentations of interesting concepts, with wonderful drawings. It is a delight to the physics student to be taken systematically thru a great range at such a level.