Rhodes’s Pulitzer-winning ebook has been having a renaissance amongst folks grappling with the potential harmful pressure of different new applied sciences. Writing in The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel referred to as it “a kind of holy text for a certain type of A.I. researcher — namely, the type who believes their creations might have the power to kill us all.”
Long earlier than “Oppenheimer,” a unique portrayal of atomic science captured my creativeness. “Copenhagen,” a play by Michael Frayn, dramatizes the mysterious 1941 go to by Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who ran the Nazis’ atomic analysis program, to the Danish scientist Nils Bohr at his residence in Copenhagen.
In the play, Heisenberg, Bohr and Bohr’s spouse Margrethe — lengthy after their deaths — argue about the actual function of Heisenberg’s go to, and whether or not he was making an attempt to hasten the daybreak of the nuclear age or delay it. (I believe it really works finest as a reside play, however for those who’re searching for streaming choices, the BBC did make a tv model starring Daniel Craig in 2002 and a radio model starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Simon Russell Beale in 2013.)
From the surface cowl, the Aug. 31, 1946, version of The New Yorker seemed like an extraordinary summer time difficulty. But inside, readers discovered that the complete factor was devoted to at least one single article: “Hiroshima,” by John Hersey. Through the tales of six survivors, Hersey documented intimately the implications of the bomb for harmless civilians:
“A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next — that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.”
Reader responses: Books that you simply suggest
It’s at all times good to search out moments of reference to Interpreter subscribers, so I used to be happy to see that Suzanne Batchelor, a reader in Central Texas, seconded my suggestion of “Hiroshima” by John Hersey:
Thanks to a highschool summer time studying listing, I learn Hersey’s easy account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb explosion: the horrific accidents, the town’s devastation. His report made it clear this bomb was way over a brand new weapon, it was an enormous horror that ought to by no means be repeated.
Source: www.nytimes.com