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Nuclear fission examples9/28/2023 ![]() ![]() Franck, in fact, had firsthand experience of the subjection of science to politics. Among the more established scientists were a number of Jewish émigrés, including Szilard, the German physicist James Franck, and the Russian German biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, whose experiences before leaving Europe had sensitized them in various ways to the moral dimensions of science. Some, such as the physicist John Simpson, were young Americans who had grown up amid New Deal social reforms. Perceiving the world-changing potential of recent discoveries in nuclear physics, Szilard and his colleagues had to inform the leaders of our democracy.Ĭhicago’s atomic village had an eclectic mix of scientists. The first lesson from the Met Lab was: Scientific knowledge, once obtained, cannot be called back. The now-famous Einstein-Szilard letter, which launched the United States on the crash course known as the Manhattan Project, was the nuclear age’s first great act of scientific responsibility. Roosevelt that a weapon of awesome power was within scientific reach-and that Hitler’s scientists knew it too. The scientists gathered in what had become known as an “atomic village” included Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born physicist who a few years earlier had helped persuade Albert Einstein to warn President Franklin D. The race to the atom bomb began at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where, on December 2, 1942, the first engineered, self-sustaining nuclear-fission reaction occurred. Read: The real lesson from The Making of the Atomic Bomb Can we engineer plants and animals resistant to natural predators without upsetting the balance of nature? Should we allow patents on life forms? Can we ethically fix supposed abnormalities in human beings? Should we allow machines to make consequential decisions-for instance, whether to use force to respond to a threat, or whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike? Atomic scientists at Chicago and elsewhere left behind a model for the responsible conduct of science, a model as applicable now as it was in Oppenheimer’s day. In laboratories at universities and at for-profit companies today, researchers are working on technologies that raise profound ethical questions. These scientists understood something that today’s pioneers in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering also need to recognize: The people who usher revolutionary advances into the world have both the expertise and the moral responsibility to help society address their dangers. Fortunately, many other early nuclear experts, including the University of Chicago scientists who first produced a chain reaction, felt an obligation to help prevent the misuse of atomic science. ![]() In part because he publicly expressed his concerns about the hydrogen bomb and a nuclear arms race, Oppenheimer-the subject of a new biopic-ended his career as a martyr in Cold War politics. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, spent years wrestling with the conflict between his science and the dictates of his conscience.
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