Kepler's solution to the misery and confusion around him was to 'sink the anchor of his peaceful studies into the ground of eternity'. Should scientists and engineers be given the luxury of this kind of withdrawal from the world? Invention and discovery have transformed nature. To what extent do the agents who made these changes have to take responsibility for their creations? This question is cogently raised by novels like Frankenstein and Jurassic Park. In both cases, we have creators who are obsessed with inventing a way of bringing what was dead back to life. Dr. Frankenstein was initially obsessed with finding the secret to life; once he found it, instead of publishing it in a refereed journal, he decided to demonstrate his power by creating life. To Hammond, the entrepreneur in Jurassic Park, discoveries were incidental to the goal of cloning dinosaurs. Both were motivated by what Arnold Pacey has called 'technological sweetness' borrowing a phrase from Robert Oppenheimer, who "is famous for his statement that one invention used in the hydrogen bomb was 'technically so sweet that you could not argue' against its adoption" (Pacey, 1989, p. 81). Creating life, cloning dinosaurs--these are stupendous technological feats.
But neither Frankenstein nor Hammond considered the possible impacts of their discoveries and inventions. Frankenstein imagined that "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me" (Shelley, 1818, p. 101). But when his eight-foot man stirred, Frankenstein ran from him in revulsion, refusing to accept the consequences for his actions. The creation turned into a monster and Frankenstein ended his life pursing its destruction. In contrast, Hammond dreamed about building new dinosaur parks as he was devoured by the clones he had brought back to life.
The moral of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park is that the inventor of a new technology like the telephone or the microchip should imagine the potential impact of her invention and embrace the consequences. Latour studied the Aramis, an automatic system of guided transportation that merged mental models based on automobiles and metros. Aramis was a project pursued in France for almost twenty years, from 1969 to 1987--it flickered in and out of existence several times before being abandoned Aramis was to be composed of small cars running on tracks. A passenger entered a destination at the station, then was assigned to a car that would couple with other cars to form a train until it got close to the destination, then it would uncouple to ride as close as possible to where the passenger wanted to go. The final design looked much like the first one, despite multiple proposals for changes from a variety of interest groups. Latour concluded that Aramis, like Frankenstein's creation, was killed because it was not loved by its creators: they saw Aramis as a research project, not as a real, working system (Latour, 1996). There was no Chester Carlson (the inventor of photocopying--see 3.14.1) for Aramis, no obsessed champion who would stop at nothing until the system was running.
A contrasting view is exemplified by the 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' slogan of those who oppose gun control. To put it in more general terms, this is the 'technology is neutral' view: a telephone can be used for life-saving communications and for telemarketing. It is up to society, not the inventor, to determine how it is used.
To shed further light on this question, let us consider the technology alluded to in the Oppenheimer quote about technological sweetness.
Einstein's discovery that E=MC2 was a significant intellectual achievement, one of the important consequences of his revolutionary theory of special relativity. He derived this equation from the fact that no object could travel faster than light; therefore, as objects approached the speed of light, they had to acquire increasing inertial mass.
This discovery suggested that all matter contained an enormous amount of energy. The cold fusion controversy, discussed in the last chapter, illustrates our continuing efforts to tap this potential energy.
In 1939, Lise Meitner was puzzling over a new experimental result obtained by her former collaborator, Otto Hahn. Meitner was in Sweden, where she had fled from the Nazis; Hahn was still in Germany, and could not publicly acknowledge working with her. But the two continued their collaboration through correspondence. Their most recent series of experiments had been an effort to figure out what happened when a neutron hit a Uranium nucleus. Their initial hypothesis was that several transuranic elements had been created. But now Hahn, a chemist, had found evidence that Barium was produced when Uranium absorbed a neutron. This made no sense--Barium was well down the periodic table from Uranium.
Hahn, Meitner and others were in a situation similar to Kepler, when he dropped the assumption of perfect circles. No one at this time had any idea that a nucleus could be split. But Meitner, isolated from her beloved laboratory and most of the scientific community, was able to spend some time on vacation with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, a physicist working with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. It was during this vacation that Meinter got a letter from Hahn outlining the incredible Barium result. She quickly dismissed the possibility of error--Hahn was too good a chemist--and worked with Otto Robert to figure out how this could have happened. They used a liquid drop metaphor for the atomic nucleus, favored by Bohr who had refined it. Frisch remembered that,
At this point we both sat down on a tree trunk, and started to calculate on scraps of paper. The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to destroy the effect of surface tension almost completely, so the uranium nucleus might indeed be a very wobbly, unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation (such as the impact of a neutron).
But there was another problem. When the two drops separated they would be driven apart by their mutual electric repulsion and would acquire a very large energy, about 200 MeV in all; where could that energy come from? Fortunately Lise Meitner remembered how to compute the masses of nuclei from the so-called packing fraction formula, and in that way she worked out that the two nuclei formed by the division of a uranium nucleus would be lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth the mass of a proton. Now whenever mass disappears energy is created, according to Einstein's formula E=mc2, and one-fifth of a proton mass was just equivalent to 200MeV. So here was the source for the energy; it all fitted! (Quoted in Sime, 1996, p. 237)
This kind of retrospective recollection, written years after the fact, deserves to be treated with a grain of salt. The account is reminiscent of the Buddha, sitting under a Bo tree and achieving enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is a plausibility to the 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations involved; Meitner and Frisch were certainly capable of doing them, once they had the liquid drop mental model.
Frisch termed this process nuclear fission, borrowing the term from a biologist. He conducted a follow-up experiment which confirmed their discovery, and he and Meitner published the results. But by then, word was already spreading, as it does in research communities.
This discovery spurred efforts to harness the energy released by fission. Leo Szilard, an emigre Hungarian physicist, was one of the first to recognize the long-term possibilities. In 1932, he had offered to work with Lise Meitner in nuclear physics because he thought such work might help save mankind. He watched the growing Nazi menace and left Germany a day before the Nazis began searching trains and preventing wholesale emigration. Szilard spent much of the succeeding years trying to find places in America and Britain for scientists driven out by the Nazis. Many of Europe's best physicists, including Szilard, Einstein, Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi, fled to America to escape from fascism, and many lesser-known ones as well.
When Szilard learned about fission, he realized immediately that the energy released was extremely high, and might be used as a source of power or as a new kind of bomb. He was particularly concerned that the United States possess such a weapon before Nazi Germany. Szilard helped Einstein, an avowed pacifist, draft a letter to President Roosevelt in which he mentioned the possibility of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and warned that nuclear experiments were being carried out in Germany. He urged the President to secure uranium supplies.
Were Einstein and Szilard in this case acting like Frankenstein, launching a technological adventure that would spin beyond their control? Szilard saw the bomb as a necessity only as long as the Nazis might build one. As soon as American troops captured German scientists like Heisenberg that were capable of designing such a weapon, Szilard lobbied for a termination of the program to build an atomic weapon (Wyden, 1984). It was, in his view, no longer necessary. But few other scientists listened to him. It seemed ridiculous to stop when they were so close to success, and after the government had invested so much.
Szilard next circulated a petition urging that no atomic bomb be used on Japan until the Japanese were given the chance to publicly refuse detailed surrender terms. When a majority of the scientists he was working with at Chicago objected on the grounds that more lives would be saved by using the bomb, Szilard responded that this was "a utilitarian argument with which I was very familiar through my previous experiences in Germany" (Wyden, 1984, p. 176).
One alternative proposed by at least some scientists was a demonstration, dropping the bomb on an unpopulated area of Japan, or so high that it would kill few people. Oppenheimer was among those who argued that a demonstration would not be convincing enough. To be effective at ending the war, it had to be dropped on a city. 'Little Boy', a bomb based on U235, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 with an estimated 100,000 casualties--no worse than the devastation wrought by Curtis LeMay's fire-bombing of Tokyo, except that this new weapon included long-term radiation effects which kept pushing the death toll higher--up to 140,000 by the end of 1945 and perhaps as many as 200,000 at the five-year mark. A physician described the horror:
Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the center of the city I saw nothing that wasn't burned to a crisp. Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir I saw a man, horribly burned, crouching beside another man who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the reservoir....In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn't enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water (Rhodes, 1986, p. 724).
The follow-up bombing of Nagasaki, with the first device made from plutonium, occurred only three days later--the Japanese government was still assimilating the news from the first bombing. The Emperor forced his military leaders to agree to a surrender offer which reached Washington on August 11th, and further use of atomic bombs was suspended.
Unlike Szilard, Einstein was not involved in developing the bomb. Not long before his death, he told Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life--when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made" (Wyden, 1984, p. 342).
Other protagonists felt morally ambiguous about their role in this invention. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos facility, described his reaction to the first successful test:
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him; he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (Rhodes, 1986, p. 676).
Shortly after the war, Oppenheimer reflected on this moment in mythological terms:
When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man's new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we knew that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it (Rhodes, 1986, p.676).
Right after the war, Oppenheimer gave a speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists in which he clarified his vision of the scientist's role in creating this kind of novelty:
When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values...It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences (Rhodes, 1986, p.761).
For Oppenheimer, the scientist is a Promethean hero who must bring fire and other great marvels to humanity, regardless of the consequences. Prometheus paid a heavy price for his gift, and so did Oppenheimer: he was eventually stripped of his security clearance and banned from the kind of high-level activities he had become used to during the war and afterwards. This investigation is exactly the sort of thing Americans became used to during the McCarthy years, even though McCarthy himself was not involved. Oppeneheimer never got to see the full evidence against him until he was examined by the prosecution, and his lawyer could not be present during this key portion of the trial. The prosecutor tied Oppy in knots over his relationships with Communist sympathizers early in World War II. But the real motive for the trial was Oppenheimer's ambivalence about pursuing a hydrogen bomb. He wanted to rein his Frankenstein in a bit, if possible--not set out immediately to make a much more powerful monster. Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the Hydrogen bomb, testified that Oppenheimer did not deserve clearance, helping to seal his fate (Goodchild, 1981).
The distinguished physicist I.I. Rabi, in a conversation with Bill Moyers' wrote Oppy's epitaph:
Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. There were scientists among them. One reason doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols.
One might also add that he never took the full hero's journey inward--never came to grips with the fact that he was a discoverer, and inventor, a man of peace and a maker of weapons, a man who believed it was right to take the path of technological sweetness and at the same time experienced grave moral doubts. Later in life, in the summer of 1964, at a conference he had helped organize to think about how to achieve a more peaceful civilization, Oppenheimer remarked "We most of all should try to be experts on the worst among ourselves" (Goodchild, 1981, p.278). This comment suggests he was taking that final step in his inward journey, and urging others to do the same.
Stanislaw Ulam, who shares with Edward Teller credit for inventing the hydrogen bomb, recalled that his Aunt Caro was related to the legendary Rabbi who created the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology made out of clay and water that grows stronger every day and will follow your orders, protecting you from enemies. Norbert Wiener, upon hearing this story, said to Ulam, "It is still in the family!" (Rhodes, 1995, p.575).
Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, two sociologists of science, use the Golem metaphor to describe science. They warn that the Golem "is clumsy and dangerous. Without control, a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour" (Collins & Pinch, 1993, p.1).
Teller's response to those who doubted that a hydrogen bomb should be built suggest he saw science as a kind of Golem: "If the development [of such a weapon] is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it" (Rhodes, 1986, p.757). Oppenheimer's scientist is morally obligated to push for new discoveries, regardless of the consequences; Teller's scientist is carried along by an inevitable tsunami of technological momentum.
In contrast, Andrei Sakharov, one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, spent much of the rest of his life trying to end the totalitarian government that benefited from his discovery. The day after the successful test of a Soviet super, Sakharov was asked to offer a toast, and drank to the hope that they would never have to use such a weapon. The Soviet general in charge of the operation made a lewd joke whose substance was, you made it, but we will decide how to use it. Like many of the American scientists, Sakharov had created a tool over which he would no longer have control. But in America, at least scientists like Oppenheimer and Teller remained respected voices regarding atomic policy--until Oppenheimer's fall from grace. Sakharov tried. He wrote letters protesting Soviet atomic tests in the 1950s and 1960s, on the grounds that radioactive contamination was immoral precisely because no one could be held accountable for it, its effects were uncertain and future generations were defenseless against it. In other words, instead of saying that one should wait until the fallout from atomic tests was proven to cause harm, one should exercise a little moral imagination, anticipate the probable effects, and ban tests altogether. He also argued that the tests made thermonuclear war more likely. Sakharov went beyond letters. Because he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, he was able to get access to policy-makers like Kruschev and make his protests personally. The leaders assured him they were taking his protests seriously, but the tests went on.
Sakharov remembered how the frustration led him to a kind of moral epiphany:
I had an awful sense of powerlessness. I could not stop something I knew was wrong and unnecessary. After that, I felt myself another man. I broke with my surroundings. It was a basic break. After that, I understood there was no point in arguing (Bailey, 1990, p. 238).
Sakharov made the transition from an insider who protested within the system to a dissident. In August, 1968, he published an essay on "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" in the New York Times. In it, he argued that,
intellectual freedom is essential to human society--freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture (Bailey, 1990, p. 247).
Sakharov had money, power and privilege within the Soviet system, but also a 'very tragic feeling'. He willingly gave up many of his privileges, including his special apartment, in protest against a corrupt system which denied individual freedom. He was eventually exiled to Gorky for seven8 years, then rehabilitated by Gorbachev. Characteristically, when Gorbachev called to announce Sakharov's freedom, the latter pointedly questioned the former about other dissidents, demanding their release. Sakharov was elected to the new Soviet Congress, drafted a new constitution for the Soviet Union, and died while writing one of his many speeches--worn out by hunger strikes, exile and the hard work of promoting freedom.
Like Frankenstein, Sakharov literally gave his life in an effort to chain the monster he had created. But unlike Frankenstein, he did not regret what he had done. He recalled initially resisting invitations to join in the development of nuclear weapons, but was concerned that if only one side possessed nuclear weapons, it might be tempted to use them, while the weaker side might be moved to desperate acts to keep from falling behind. In Sakharov's view, both he and Oppenheimer were justified in creating weapons, in order to maintain the terrible balance that Niels Bohr foresaw.
Sakahrov and his fellow scientists were further spurred by the knowledge that they were surrounded by prison laborers who constructed the buildings and mined the uranium. Paradoxically, Sakharov felt their work had to justify this terrible sacrifice. There was another motive as well--Oppenheimer's technological sweetness:
I found it very interesting. This was not because of what Fermi calls 'interesting physics'; here the interest was evoked by the grandiosity of the problem, the possibility to show what you could do. That's the way scientists are (Bailey, 1990, p. 423).
Like Prometheus, Sakharov brought the fire--and like the true Campbellian hero, when confronted with the consequences of his action, he heeded the call for an inward journey, one that transformed him from a Hero of the Soviet Union into a heroic dissident.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999