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By Root 2420 0

Birge at Berkeley had angered Oppenheimer by delaying the job offer he had recommended. Oppenheimer wrote again: “It would seem to me that under these circumstances too much of courage was not required in making a commitment to a young scientist… . I perhaps presumed too much on the excellence of his reputation among those to whom he is known… . He is not only an extremely brilliant theorist, but a man of the greatest robustness, responsibility and warmth, a brilliant and lucid teacher … one of the most responsible men I have ever met… . We regard him as invaluable here; he has been given a responsibility and his work carries a weight far beyond his years… .” Birge finally came through with an offer to Feynman that summer, but too late. When Arline was alive they had talked about moving to California for her health. Now Bethe easily swayed him.

Feynman became the first of the group leaders to leave, in October 1945. There were only a few reports to write up and some final safety tours of Oak Ridge and Hanford. It was on his last trip to Oak Ridge, as he walked past a shop window, that he happened to see a pretty dress. Before he could prevent it, a thought came. Arline would like that. For the first time since her death, he wept.

CORNELL

For physics as an enterprise within American culture there were two eras. One ended and the other began in the summer of the atomic bombs. Politicians, educators, newspaper editors, priests, and the scientists themselves began to understand the divide that had been crossed.

“Among the divinities of ancient Greece, there was a Titan named Prometheus,” ran a typical essay in The Christian Century the next winter. “He stole fire from heaven and gave it to man… . For this act, Prometheus has been held in highest honor as a benefactor of humanity and the divine patron of science and learning.” No more. Now, rather to the cleric essayist’s delight, the atomic bomb had humbled Prometheus’s heirs, the scientists. Their centuries of progress had decisively ended with their invention of a device of human self-destruction. Now it was time for Christian ministers to step in. Even the scientists, he said, “have for the first time in history turned aside from their vocation and become statesmen and evangelists, preaching the grim gospel of damnation unless men repent.” Here he was alluding to J. Robert Oppenheimer, for Oppenheimer had already seen the aptness of the Promethean legend—who could have missed it?—and had begun to speak out both to the public and to scientists. What Oppenheimer preached, however, was more subtle than a gospel of damnation. He reminded listeners that the religious had long felt threatened by science, and now the only mildly God-fearing public had something real to fear. He suspected that atomic weapons would scare people more than any scientific development since Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Already, in November 1945, with relieved soldiers and sailors streaming home from the Pacific Theater, before fallout shelters, nuclear proliferation, and ban the bomb had a chance to enter the language, Oppenheimer anticipated the time when celebration would give way to dread. “Atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world,” he told his friends and colleagues of the past thirty months. His audience filled the largest assembly hall in Los Alamos, its movie theater. He knew that the newspapers and magazines glorifying the scientists’ achievement would soon recognize how little real mystery there had been, how unremarkable, actually, were the problems of nuclear fission (if not implosion), how easy atomic bombs would be to make, and how affordable for many nations.

Prometheus was not the only mythic figure standing in for the scientist; the other was Faust. Lately the Faustian bargain for knowledge and power had not seemed so horrible as it had in medieval times. Knowledge meant washing machines and medicines, and the devil had softened into an amusing character for Saturday cartoons and Broadway musicals. But now the fires in two Japanese cities renewed a primal