Oppenheimer himself would say much later that “I was on the point of bumping myself off”. He suffered from depression all his life; he was diagnosed after the poisoned-apple incident as a “hopeless case” of “dementia praecox”, a now defunct diagnosis which is usually now associated with schizophrenia. He probably didn’t have schizophrenia — depression can cause delusions — but he was certainly unstable. And it clearly started to grate: in Göttingen, his fellow students signed a petition saying they’d boycott the class if he didn’t shut up in seminars. At the Rad Lab he would interrupt guest speakers, saying impatiently: “Oh come on now! We all know that. Let’s get on with it.” He sounds, in short, like a bit of a dickhead: rude, self-centred, pushy.
All in all, as discussed, he was not an obvious choice to run a multi-billion-dollar top-secret superweapon project involving hundreds of thousands of people. But General Leslie Groves saw something in Oppenheimer which not everyone else could. Groves would say of him in his memoir that he had “two major disadvantages — he had had almost no administrative experience of any kind, and he was not a Nobel Prize winner”. He noted an “overweening ambition”, a breadth of knowledge, and a considerable genius.
But Oppenheimer wanted something more than scientific discoveries — he wanted glory, fame. His friend Freeman Dyson, another great physicist, would say later: “He always wanted to be at the centre. This quality is good for soldiers and politicians but bad for original thinkers.” He lacked, in Dyson’s phrase, Sitzfleisch. It means “sitting flesh”, backside, but metaphorically the ability to sit still and finish something. Instead, he was “driven by an irresistible ambition to play a leading part in historic events”.
This made him a flawed scientist. Dyson tells how Oppenheimer invented the concept of black holes in 1939, decades before Stephen Hawking would make them famous. But having made the insight, he never returned to it. He got distracted by other, more fashionable things.
But it made him a peerless leader. “When he was present at the centre of action,” said Dyson, “he rose to the occasion and took charge of the situation with unexpected competence… He was astonishingly effective as leader of the [Manhattan] project.” His dilettante interests meant he could understand the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the metallurgists. His inability to focus on a topic was less of a problem if he could order an underling to focus on it for him.
Groves saw this. Under Oppenheimer’s guidance, the project took the American nuclear programme from essentially nowhere to completion within three years. When he joined, there was no nuclear programme to speak of. Scientists were imported from Europe, especially Britain and Hungary. Everything had to be developed from scratch, and it was: the Manhattan Project created thousands of inventions. The patents it processed were secret, of course, but if they had been filed, then by the end of the war they would have represented 1% of all existing patents. Nuclear science progressed leaps and bounds in the project’s laboratories, as did digital technology, materials science, and a hundred other disciplines.
Why did it work? Oppenheimer can surely take much of the credit. It was Oppenheimer who recognised that the firing mechanism used for a uranium bomb, one of the two models used, would not be as effective in a plutonium bomb, and called for another system, an “implosion” system which blasted two hemispheres of plutonium together with high explosive. It was also he who recruited John von Neumann, one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who in turn developed the perfectly shaped lenses of high explosives required to slam the plutonium together with perfectly even pressure all around the sphere, a procedure one scientist compared to trying to crush a beer can without spilling any of the beer.
We can’t know the counterfactual. Perhaps other, less unstable, less communist-sympathising project leaders were available. Perhaps they would have done as good a job: after all, the project “brought together the greatest concentration of scientific luminaries working on a single project that the world had ever seen,” as Alex Wellerstein wrote. As well as Oppenheimer and von Neumann, the project had at its disposal Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Vannevar Bush, Richard Feynman, and many more.
It also had something like 1% of the entire US civilian labour force and 1% of the country’s electrical power at its disposal. Maybe you could have put anyone in charge of that and it would have done well, much as any idiot can probably manage Real Madrid sufficiently well to win most football matches: just tell all your stars to go out and play football. But Groves took a chance that perhaps not many others would, one that would leave him hanging in the wind if it went wrong.
Again, imagine it now: the government appointing someone with a known track record of violence and delusional mental illness, placed in charge of a vital defence project. It would be near-impossible: none of the “weirdos” Dominic Cummings wanted to appoint to government (and I’ve met a few of them) was remotely as weird as Robert Oppenheimer. No Communist Party-adjacent attempted murderers there. Of course, Groves had the dictatorial authority granted by war — the US was committed to the defeat of Germany and Japan and committing its entire industrial base to the task; the perfect situation for big, dramatic bets like Manhattan — but still it was bold and dangerous.
In a weird way, I’m reminded of the appointment of Kate Bingham to the UK’s Vaccine Task Force: She was well-qualified, and again the emergency situation gave the government leeway to make snap decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. But her political connections — she is married to a then-minister, Jesse Norman — made her a target: the Good Law Project sued, calling her appointment “jobs for their mates”. The British vaccine procurement was a roaring success and Bingham’s appointment was vindicated, but if it had not been, then the decision would have looked dreadful. (Please do not take this to mean that I think Kate Bingham is the same as Robert Oppenheimer.)
There are plenty of big scientific projects around today. But nothing on the scale of Los Alamos: Artemis, the successor to the Apollo moon missions, has perhaps 30,000 employees. (Apollo itself, driven by Cold War anxiety and national willy-waving, was bigger even than Manhattan, with nearly half a million staff at its peak.) Perhaps the exciting work has moved into the private sector, but even the cutting-edge AI firms employ a few hundred or a few thousand people, some far fewer. Midjourney, the best of the art AIs, has a staff of a dozen or so. There are plenty of strange geniuses around — Demis Hassabis, the video-game-designing chess savant behind DeepMind, is my favourite — but nowhere has the kind of world monopoly on them that Oppenheimer established.
Nonetheless, there’s a parallel with modern AI. Oppenheimer seemed to want the responsibility of having created the bomb: he said that the physicists involved in the project had “known sin”. Von Neumann responded, pithily, that “Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.” When AI researchers now talk of the threat of AI, how it could destroy humanity, there is a hint of that – what we are doing is so amazing and powerful that it could destroy the world, aren’t you impressed? Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not true – I think there’s a decent chance AI could destroy the world, and developing nuclear weapons really was a morally ambiguous thing to do. But people who want to be great can scratch that itch by being great and terrible, as well as great and good.
Oppenheimer was not ashamed of his work, even if, for PR reasons, he sometimes wanted to appear so. He “continued for the rest of his life to be proud of his achievement,” Dyson wrote. And when a German playwright depicted him as a tragic hero who regretted his actions, he protested bitterly. The line from the Bhagavad Gita about death was a later amendment. Years earlier, he had quoted a different one: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,” he said, “that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.” That does not sound like a man who feels remorse.
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SubscribeI would have thought the real genius here, if indeed there was one, was the anglophobic Lieutenant General Leslie Groves.
Without his ‘leadership’, Oppenheimer and his disparate collection of male hysteric and prima donnas would have torn itself apart.
Incidentally Groves grudgingly admitted in 1962 that without “the British scientists crucial experience, there probably would have been no atomic bomb to drop on Hiroshima.”*
(* Now It Can Be Told, published1962.)
I thought Groves was the head of the project and O was ‘just’ in charge of the actual science. Can you clarify?
Correct.
In fact Groves picked O despite the fact that he was ‘tainted’ with Communism, and was NOT a Nobel Prize Winner.
Correct.
In fact Groves picked O despite the fact that he was ‘tainted’ with Communism, and was NOT a Nobel Prize Winner.
While Ronald Reagan postulated that “Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong,” who can know what may have historically come to fruition had the U.S. remained the sole possessor of atomic weaponry.
There’s a presumptive, and perhaps even arrogant, concept of American leadership as somehow, unless directly militarily provoked, being morally/ethically above using nuclear weapons internationally.
Cannot absolute power corrupt absolutely?
I read that, after President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the forces warring with North Korea — for the latter’s remarks about using many atomic bombs to promptly end the war — Americans’ approval-rating of the president dropped to 23 percent.
It was a record-breaking low, even lower than the worst approval-rating points of the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Had it not been for the formidable international pressure on Truman (and perhaps his personal morality) to relieve MacArthur as commander,
Truman may have eventually succumbed to domestic political pressure to allow MacArthur’s command to continue.
Groves respected James Chadwick who discovered the neutron and was genius who delivered results and William Penny who undertook much of the maths and provided sage advice. Britain provided information on how to make the atom bomb and how much it would cost $25M via the Tizard Mission providing reports from the MAUD Committee.
MAUD Committee – Wikipedia
Tizard Mission – Wikipedia
Oppenheimer needs to be considered in comparison to Rutherford, J Chadwick , J J Thompson, Paul Dirac, etc
The Americans have ignored the contribution from the British Empire and then passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 which meant British, Canadian and Australian scientists were deported and were not allowed to take their notebooks with them.
Atomic Energy Act of 1946 – Wikipedia
Compare the spirit which gave rise to the Tizard Mission and that of the Atomic Energy Act 1946. The Atomic Energy Act could have stopped Britain developing her own nuclear bombs but luckily, the British, Canadian and Australian scientists had such brilliant intellects they could remember what was in their notebooks.
I thought Groves was the head of the project and O was ‘just’ in charge of the actual science. Can you clarify?
While Ronald Reagan postulated that “Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong,” who can know what may have historically come to fruition had the U.S. remained the sole possessor of atomic weaponry.
There’s a presumptive, and perhaps even arrogant, concept of American leadership as somehow, unless directly militarily provoked, being morally/ethically above using nuclear weapons internationally.
Cannot absolute power corrupt absolutely?
I read that, after President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the forces warring with North Korea — for the latter’s remarks about using many atomic bombs to promptly end the war — Americans’ approval-rating of the president dropped to 23 percent.
It was a record-breaking low, even lower than the worst approval-rating points of the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Had it not been for the formidable international pressure on Truman (and perhaps his personal morality) to relieve MacArthur as commander,
Truman may have eventually succumbed to domestic political pressure to allow MacArthur’s command to continue.
Groves respected James Chadwick who discovered the neutron and was genius who delivered results and William Penny who undertook much of the maths and provided sage advice. Britain provided information on how to make the atom bomb and how much it would cost $25M via the Tizard Mission providing reports from the MAUD Committee.
MAUD Committee – Wikipedia
Tizard Mission – Wikipedia
Oppenheimer needs to be considered in comparison to Rutherford, J Chadwick , J J Thompson, Paul Dirac, etc
The Americans have ignored the contribution from the British Empire and then passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 which meant British, Canadian and Australian scientists were deported and were not allowed to take their notebooks with them.
Atomic Energy Act of 1946 – Wikipedia
Compare the spirit which gave rise to the Tizard Mission and that of the Atomic Energy Act 1946. The Atomic Energy Act could have stopped Britain developing her own nuclear bombs but luckily, the British, Canadian and Australian scientists had such brilliant intellects they could remember what was in their notebooks.
I would have thought the real genius here, if indeed there was one, was the anglophobic Lieutenant General Leslie Groves.
Without his ‘leadership’, Oppenheimer and his disparate collection of male hysteric and prima donnas would have torn itself apart.
Incidentally Groves grudgingly admitted in 1962 that without “the British scientists crucial experience, there probably would have been no atomic bomb to drop on Hiroshima.”*
(* Now It Can Be Told, published1962.)
Welcome back TC! I for one, think UnHerd is much enhanced with your contribution.
Oppenheimer was extraordinary, but I’m one of those who thinks the bomb would have got made regardless, there or thereabouts when it did, no matter who was in charge of the project – it would have got made even if no one was in charge, and given the statistics quoted about the sheer number of people involved and the sheer amount of money spent, more debatably I think it would have got made without the people or the spend. By way of proof, I point to the UK producing it’s own version on a shoestring just a few years after the war. Notwithstanding that the bomb was a very very complicated engineering feat indeed, It would have taken very little by way of ah-ha! moments that someone (or a combination of someones, potentially spread out in geography and time) would have solved it, by coming up with much simpler, cheaper solutions, which never come into existence because they didn’t need to. It also could have happened anywhere. I mean by this, I don’t think someone from Burkina Faso could have done at that time (perhaps later), but someone in Germany or Russia or even China could have done it given the right set of sparks. (In this context France is an interesting case. We know that with WWII already in full swing, there was a race between Germany, the US, the UK, with the USSR and Japan further back, to get to nukes first. The French would of course have been players, except they had rather got distracted with all the cheese eating and the monkeying around and the surrendering).
My hypothesis here, which no doubt will sound completely bonkers to most, has implications looking through both ends of the telescope. It implies, for example, that the reason humanity hasn’t solved the problem of capturing solar energy, or of burning fossil fuels completely cleanly by now, is because humanity doesn’t really want to. As in, not fussed enough. And, peering into the tornado that is the incoming AI future, there is a ‘Manhattan’ parallel with the wall of money being spent on LLM training runs (tens, to even hundreds of millions per large run), but I bet within a couple of years it will become possible for anyone to do GPT-4 size runs on a shoestring on a home laptop, assuming you can get enough data to feed the run. Anyway, enough already.
I’m also pleased to note, you are some way down the AI doomer path, perhaps not quite the outright doomer stance of people like me (as in, we are screwed), but getting there it seems. Perhaps a series of pieces on LLMs and existential risk?
Interesting thoughts. I thought the author might’ve explored further how Oppenheimer’s leadership worked, by citing specific examples of where his personal input made a difference. Maybe it worked because he had the personality to let others get on with what they were tasked with (and perhaps accept input from those who weren’t) rather than being overbearing, but more detail along those lines would’ve been interesting.
Where much ‘management’ falls down is through interference and meddling, making others lose confidence.
Completely bonkers? Nope, nothing that grand – just an attempt to reduce technical issues to the dreary level of a moral question and thus easy fodder for opinion-churning, student-level debate (a favourite pastime of yours I expect).
As for your easy ‘anyone-coulda-dunnit’ dismissal of both Oppenheimer and the Manhattan project – you might want to replace all those ‘would haves’ and ‘could haves’ with a bit of actual history. It took a lot more than a few ‘aha’ moments to create the bomb and its thermonuclear successor.
Much of the early proliferation of crucial knowledge was the result, not of honest parallel research, but of espionage. It is estimated that a majority of those scientists working at Los Alamos had Left wing sympathies (typical of the intellectual classes I guess) so the leaking of important information was inevitable.
Ignoring the embedded ad hominems (and what on earth for, I mean don’t you prefer debate to be civil?), so who do you think handed nuke technology over to the Chinese then?
Of course other research could have eventually done the same job, but there is not much doubt the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been greatly assisted by espionage.
I don’t dispute at all that large scale espionage is happening and has happened in the past. The Chinese of course (as in, they are certainly looting the UK right now), but what no one ever wants to discuss is that for example, the French do as much. But I’m asking the question: how did the Chinese become nuclear capable in the early sixties, when they were in the midsts of Mao’s purges and dirt poor. The idea they could steal anything off of the west at the time is just ludicrous.
By that point in time, the design principles were well known. Fissionable material was the Chinese issue and their first was a U-235 device. The U-235 was via thousands of small separation machines and the bomb was a simple one. Nobody knows how many may have died to develop the critical amount. Later bombs used reactor produced Pu.
By that point in time, the design principles were well known. Fissionable material was the Chinese issue and their first was a U-235 device. The U-235 was via thousands of small separation machines and the bomb was a simple one. Nobody knows how many may have died to develop the critical amount. Later bombs used reactor produced Pu.
I don’t dispute at all that large scale espionage is happening and has happened in the past. The Chinese of course (as in, they are certainly looting the UK right now), but what no one ever wants to discuss is that for example, the French do as much. But I’m asking the question: how did the Chinese become nuclear capable in the early sixties, when they were in the midsts of Mao’s purges and dirt poor. The idea they could steal anything off of the west at the time is just ludicrous.
Of course other research could have eventually done the same job, but there is not much doubt the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been greatly assisted by espionage.
Ignoring the embedded ad hominems (and what on earth for, I mean don’t you prefer debate to be civil?), so who do you think handed nuke technology over to the Chinese then?
I rather like the story about Truman and Oppenheimer
“Oppenheimer when he went into Truman’s Office with Dean Acheson said to the latter, wringing his hands:”I have blood on my hands”. Truman later said to Acheson: “Never bring that f**king cretin in here again. He didn’t drop the bomb. I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick.”
I have always thought people underestimate Truman – beneath that bank manager demeanor was a spine of steel.
“When his eight years as President ended on January 20, 1953, private citizen Harry Truman took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with other passengers along the way. He had no secret service protection. His only income was an Army pension.
Later that year, Truman bought a Chrysler New Yorker and got behind the wheel. He and Bess drove to Washington, New York and back home again by themselves.”
I think that tells you a lot about the man and, when it comes to public service, how things have changed very much for the worse.
He had a very lucrative contract with Life magazine for his memoirs — and during his years as President he made the equivalent of what today would be about a million a year, supplemented by a large expense account he was able to convert to tax-free income. A thorough debunking of the Truman myth is here: https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2572&context=faculty-articles
He had a very lucrative contract with Life magazine for his memoirs — and during his years as President he made the equivalent of what today would be about a million a year, supplemented by a large expense account he was able to convert to tax-free income. A thorough debunking of the Truman myth is here: https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2572&context=faculty-articles
“When his eight years as President ended on January 20, 1953, private citizen Harry Truman took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with other passengers along the way. He had no secret service protection. His only income was an Army pension.
Later that year, Truman bought a Chrysler New Yorker and got behind the wheel. He and Bess drove to Washington, New York and back home again by themselves.”
I think that tells you a lot about the man and, when it comes to public service, how things have changed very much for the worse.
I have always thought people underestimate Truman – beneath that bank manager demeanor was a spine of steel.
I don’t think it’s because “humanity doesn’t really want to” – or at least that’s a pretty vague concept anyway. But how much do we want to, and at what cost, and what do we consider the chances of success? Unless the situation is pretty desperate in some way there is societal consensus over.
There is a limit to the percentage of GDP we are willing in any peacetime society, even in, China, to carrying out projects of anything like that scale, and with no guarantee of success and quite a high chance of things going very wrong and a whole lot of resources “wasted” (as it would be depicted).
And it is easy to think the visionaries are right, but it very often doesn’t look that way. Look at Blue Streak. Some technical problems may just not be economically soluble – nuclear fusion and ever improving batteries maybe – while others are not economically deliverable – faster than sound flight – surely that’s a pretty easy problem compared with the Manhattan Project?
The only “woulda” I would concede is that, without the Nazi policies on the Jews, Germany would have had the technical prowess to go along with their total war approach. But then, without those policies, the Nazis wouldn’t have been Nazis. I’m in agreement that historical hypotheticals don’t serve much purpose beyond interesting (in small doses) conversation.
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee success, so it’s not clear that the Manhattan Project could have succeeded with the organizational and technical genius of Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Von Neuman.
For an example of how money by itself does not solve a scientific problem, look at the 1-billion euro Human Brain Project – ten years later and nothing much to show.
Interesting thoughts. I thought the author might’ve explored further how Oppenheimer’s leadership worked, by citing specific examples of where his personal input made a difference. Maybe it worked because he had the personality to let others get on with what they were tasked with (and perhaps accept input from those who weren’t) rather than being overbearing, but more detail along those lines would’ve been interesting.
Where much ‘management’ falls down is through interference and meddling, making others lose confidence.
Completely bonkers? Nope, nothing that grand – just an attempt to reduce technical issues to the dreary level of a moral question and thus easy fodder for opinion-churning, student-level debate (a favourite pastime of yours I expect).
As for your easy ‘anyone-coulda-dunnit’ dismissal of both Oppenheimer and the Manhattan project – you might want to replace all those ‘would haves’ and ‘could haves’ with a bit of actual history. It took a lot more than a few ‘aha’ moments to create the bomb and its thermonuclear successor.
Much of the early proliferation of crucial knowledge was the result, not of honest parallel research, but of espionage. It is estimated that a majority of those scientists working at Los Alamos had Left wing sympathies (typical of the intellectual classes I guess) so the leaking of important information was inevitable.
I rather like the story about Truman and Oppenheimer
“Oppenheimer when he went into Truman’s Office with Dean Acheson said to the latter, wringing his hands:”I have blood on my hands”. Truman later said to Acheson: “Never bring that f**king cretin in here again. He didn’t drop the bomb. I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick.”
I don’t think it’s because “humanity doesn’t really want to” – or at least that’s a pretty vague concept anyway. But how much do we want to, and at what cost, and what do we consider the chances of success? Unless the situation is pretty desperate in some way there is societal consensus over.
There is a limit to the percentage of GDP we are willing in any peacetime society, even in, China, to carrying out projects of anything like that scale, and with no guarantee of success and quite a high chance of things going very wrong and a whole lot of resources “wasted” (as it would be depicted).
And it is easy to think the visionaries are right, but it very often doesn’t look that way. Look at Blue Streak. Some technical problems may just not be economically soluble – nuclear fusion and ever improving batteries maybe – while others are not economically deliverable – faster than sound flight – surely that’s a pretty easy problem compared with the Manhattan Project?
The only “woulda” I would concede is that, without the Nazi policies on the Jews, Germany would have had the technical prowess to go along with their total war approach. But then, without those policies, the Nazis wouldn’t have been Nazis. I’m in agreement that historical hypotheticals don’t serve much purpose beyond interesting (in small doses) conversation.
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee success, so it’s not clear that the Manhattan Project could have succeeded with the organizational and technical genius of Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Von Neuman.
For an example of how money by itself does not solve a scientific problem, look at the 1-billion euro Human Brain Project – ten years later and nothing much to show.
Welcome back TC! I for one, think UnHerd is much enhanced with your contribution.
Oppenheimer was extraordinary, but I’m one of those who thinks the bomb would have got made regardless, there or thereabouts when it did, no matter who was in charge of the project – it would have got made even if no one was in charge, and given the statistics quoted about the sheer number of people involved and the sheer amount of money spent, more debatably I think it would have got made without the people or the spend. By way of proof, I point to the UK producing it’s own version on a shoestring just a few years after the war. Notwithstanding that the bomb was a very very complicated engineering feat indeed, It would have taken very little by way of ah-ha! moments that someone (or a combination of someones, potentially spread out in geography and time) would have solved it, by coming up with much simpler, cheaper solutions, which never come into existence because they didn’t need to. It also could have happened anywhere. I mean by this, I don’t think someone from Burkina Faso could have done at that time (perhaps later), but someone in Germany or Russia or even China could have done it given the right set of sparks. (In this context France is an interesting case. We know that with WWII already in full swing, there was a race between Germany, the US, the UK, with the USSR and Japan further back, to get to nukes first. The French would of course have been players, except they had rather got distracted with all the cheese eating and the monkeying around and the surrendering).
My hypothesis here, which no doubt will sound completely bonkers to most, has implications looking through both ends of the telescope. It implies, for example, that the reason humanity hasn’t solved the problem of capturing solar energy, or of burning fossil fuels completely cleanly by now, is because humanity doesn’t really want to. As in, not fussed enough. And, peering into the tornado that is the incoming AI future, there is a ‘Manhattan’ parallel with the wall of money being spent on LLM training runs (tens, to even hundreds of millions per large run), but I bet within a couple of years it will become possible for anyone to do GPT-4 size runs on a shoestring on a home laptop, assuming you can get enough data to feed the run. Anyway, enough already.
I’m also pleased to note, you are some way down the AI doomer path, perhaps not quite the outright doomer stance of people like me (as in, we are screwed), but getting there it seems. Perhaps a series of pieces on LLMs and existential risk?
We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us, said Churchill. What Churchill didn’t say was whether we have a menu choice on how we might be shaped by the buildings.
Oppenheimer shaped the atomic bomb, and the atomic bomb shaped him. The singular destructiveness of the bomb demanded the assignment of a god-like creator, a role Oppenheimer willingly chose to accept, and a legend he chose to burnish with his retrospective quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
More generally, humanity shaped the atomic bomb, and the atomic bomb has shaped humanity. To be exact, it has shaped in us a fear of it, this fear has shaped our sense of collective destruction and we have chosen global diplomatic relations as our response. Fear teaches caution, and from caution everyone (so far) has chosen to exercise control of atomic weapons.
We are shaping AI, and AI will shape us. Deaf to the doomsayers, AI is being adopted by individuals and organisations at a breakneck pace. We might publicly express worry, but privately we can only see how easy it is to get AI to do our thinking and learning for us. Opposite to fear, we believe in the omniscience of AI, lazily choosing to abandon our agency to AI, giving up control and becoming dumb in the process.
The biggest threat to humanity isn’t the building, it is what we choose to do with the building. We have a choice. Or do we?
What if at the zenith of our building we create a building of such specificity and so compelling, we effectively don’t have a choice? What if we inadvertently build a prison for ourselves?
I don’t believe that the principle of garbage in, garbage out has been obviated by AI. For simple it will work. For hard (meaning the need for insight and creativity), not. I recall an anecdote about two physicists, one Urey and the other forgotten. The forgotten one could brilliantly expound upon all things nuclear. Urey couldn’t. Urey is remembered because he made creative contributions to the field.
You’re absolutely right. But consider Europe pre-enlightenment: religion was so powerful that creativity was heavily constrained. A critical mass of the population were utterly convinced of the infallibility of religion. Imagine a population largely convinced of the infallibility of AI: no matter the garbage coming out, the myth of AI might mean those who question the garbage are the ones considered heretics. We have already seen glimpses of this with modelling trumping empirical science in so many fields. Either by our own laziness or propaganda by the AI investors, enough people might come to unquestionably believe AI.
You’re absolutely right. But consider Europe pre-enlightenment: religion was so powerful that creativity was heavily constrained. A critical mass of the population were utterly convinced of the infallibility of religion. Imagine a population largely convinced of the infallibility of AI: no matter the garbage coming out, the myth of AI might mean those who question the garbage are the ones considered heretics. We have already seen glimpses of this with modelling trumping empirical science in so many fields. Either by our own laziness or propaganda by the AI investors, enough people might come to unquestionably believe AI.
Our collective choices are far more limited than anyone would want to imagine, thanks to the fact that it is impossible to prove that an act is a cyber-crime, let alone proving a cyber-criminal’s individual guilt beyond reasonable doubt with the exception of ransomware, theft, child-sexual-abuse and the likes.
Opportunity makes thieves everywhere, including the Australian Signals Directorate.
Who uses weaponisable technology, including AI, and for what purpose, is anyone’s guess, since
– we generate and store information digitally, i.e. in unprotectable cyber-space
– the Internet is everywhere, and
– one of the most trusted Western allies is Australia.
Australia never had functional law-enforcement, has never been able to control information, rogue police or technology. Reputation is managed via terrorising public servant witnesses and victims of crimes into silent oblivion – i.e. via crime hiding.
Crime hiding is perfected to such a degree, I lived within a 10 km radius 1988-2008 in Melbourne of where a stalker ex-coworker’s onslaught of crimes against me started in 2009, and knew nothing about what lies beneath Australia’s fake squeaky-clean reputation.
Having been blocked as a public servant witness to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse from reporting those crimes, and having experienced devastating crimes 2009-current (22 July 2023) that will never be punished often via the use of technology not known* yet to civilian experts, I am terrified about Australia having faked its way in Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc.
Australia has no FBI. Our police e.g. Victoria Police never had either duty of care, or accountability, while always having had a monopoly on what is a crime means police criminality is wide-spread, deep-rooted and existed ever since police existed in Australia. When I realised how closely crimes against me follow documented Victoria Police crime strategies, I scanned “Victoria Police Corruption” (R.T. Hoser, Kotabi, 1999) into pdf and shared it with the author’s permission for free: if you can handle large files click here, if not, click here.
* I block out all trauma I can, so the below is an incomplete list of tech used in crimes against me in Melbourne, Australia. There is no doubt far more and far worse is in circulation than what I have had the dubious honour of experiencing.
Ongoing from
2009 mobile phone remote restart a dozen times a day, often in the middle of phone calls
2011 smart-meter hacking, power selectively turned off/on/off to circuits, systems and devices
2015 car electronics’ hacking
2016 iPhone 6/6s hacking & sabotage
2019 air-gap breaching + whatever causes variations of “Havana Syndrome” type incidents
2022 Faraday Cage penetration
—
I cannot stop Australia’s untouchable government insiders committing devastating crimes. I had exhausted all legal avenues trying to get serious crimes I am forced to learn about daily/hourly at least on official record and failed, prior to making Public Interest Disclosures like this one.
I need to know that I did not stay silent.
I don’t believe that the principle of garbage in, garbage out has been obviated by AI. For simple it will work. For hard (meaning the need for insight and creativity), not. I recall an anecdote about two physicists, one Urey and the other forgotten. The forgotten one could brilliantly expound upon all things nuclear. Urey couldn’t. Urey is remembered because he made creative contributions to the field.
Our collective choices are far more limited than anyone would want to imagine, thanks to the fact that it is impossible to prove that an act is a cyber-crime, let alone proving a cyber-criminal’s individual guilt beyond reasonable doubt with the exception of ransomware, theft, child-sexual-abuse and the likes.
Opportunity makes thieves everywhere, including the Australian Signals Directorate.
Who uses weaponisable technology, including AI, and for what purpose, is anyone’s guess, since
– we generate and store information digitally, i.e. in unprotectable cyber-space
– the Internet is everywhere, and
– one of the most trusted Western allies is Australia.
Australia never had functional law-enforcement, has never been able to control information, rogue police or technology. Reputation is managed via terrorising public servant witnesses and victims of crimes into silent oblivion – i.e. via crime hiding.
Crime hiding is perfected to such a degree, I lived within a 10 km radius 1988-2008 in Melbourne of where a stalker ex-coworker’s onslaught of crimes against me started in 2009, and knew nothing about what lies beneath Australia’s fake squeaky-clean reputation.
Having been blocked as a public servant witness to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse from reporting those crimes, and having experienced devastating crimes 2009-current (22 July 2023) that will never be punished often via the use of technology not known* yet to civilian experts, I am terrified about Australia having faked its way in Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc.
Australia has no FBI. Our police e.g. Victoria Police never had either duty of care, or accountability, while always having had a monopoly on what is a crime means police criminality is wide-spread, deep-rooted and existed ever since police existed in Australia. When I realised how closely crimes against me follow documented Victoria Police crime strategies, I scanned “Victoria Police Corruption” (R.T. Hoser, Kotabi, 1999) into pdf and shared it with the author’s permission for free: if you can handle large files click here, if not, click here.
* I block out all trauma I can, so the below is an incomplete list of tech used in crimes against me in Melbourne, Australia. There is no doubt far more and far worse is in circulation than what I have had the dubious honour of experiencing.
Ongoing from
2009 mobile phone remote restart a dozen times a day, often in the middle of phone calls
2011 smart-meter hacking, power selectively turned off/on/off to circuits, systems and devices
2015 car electronics’ hacking
2016 iPhone 6/6s hacking & sabotage
2019 air-gap breaching + whatever causes variations of “Havana Syndrome” type incidents
2022 Faraday Cage penetration
—
I cannot stop Australia’s untouchable government insiders committing devastating crimes. I had exhausted all legal avenues trying to get serious crimes I am forced to learn about daily/hourly at least on official record and failed, prior to making Public Interest Disclosures like this one.
I need to know that I did not stay silent.
We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us, said Churchill. What Churchill didn’t say was whether we have a menu choice on how we might be shaped by the buildings.
Oppenheimer shaped the atomic bomb, and the atomic bomb shaped him. The singular destructiveness of the bomb demanded the assignment of a god-like creator, a role Oppenheimer willingly chose to accept, and a legend he chose to burnish with his retrospective quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
More generally, humanity shaped the atomic bomb, and the atomic bomb has shaped humanity. To be exact, it has shaped in us a fear of it, this fear has shaped our sense of collective destruction and we have chosen global diplomatic relations as our response. Fear teaches caution, and from caution everyone (so far) has chosen to exercise control of atomic weapons.
We are shaping AI, and AI will shape us. Deaf to the doomsayers, AI is being adopted by individuals and organisations at a breakneck pace. We might publicly express worry, but privately we can only see how easy it is to get AI to do our thinking and learning for us. Opposite to fear, we believe in the omniscience of AI, lazily choosing to abandon our agency to AI, giving up control and becoming dumb in the process.
The biggest threat to humanity isn’t the building, it is what we choose to do with the building. We have a choice. Or do we?
What if at the zenith of our building we create a building of such specificity and so compelling, we effectively don’t have a choice? What if we inadvertently build a prison for ourselves?
With all the sudden interest in Oppenheimer I decided to dig out my old DVD of the 1980 documentary movie about the Manhattan project: The Day After Trinity. This movie had a brief showing in one or two of London’s art house cinemas in 1981 before disappearing into obscurity.
A shame as it includes interviews with some of the key figures around Oppenheimer – people who were still alive at the time the documentary was made. Toward the end there is archive footage of an interview where a gloomy Oppenheimer mutters that in his view attempts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons should have begun “the day after Trinity”.
.
.
With all the sudden interest in Oppenheimer I decided to dig out my old DVD of the 1980 documentary movie about the Manhattan project: The Day After Trinity. This movie had a brief showing in one or two of London’s art house cinemas in 1981 before disappearing into obscurity.
A shame as it includes interviews with some of the key figures around Oppenheimer – people who were still alive at the time the documentary was made. Toward the end there is archive footage of an interview where a gloomy Oppenheimer mutters that in his view attempts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons should have begun “the day after Trinity”.
Just come back from Brno which has a small but fascinating museum in memory of Gregor Mendel. The resources Mendel used in his research on inherited characteristics are the opposite extreme of the riches lavished on the Manhatten Project. The flower bed outside the museum has examples of the plants such as peas and thistles which he used. As for ego…. He did publish his findings in a local scientific journal. But it was decades before other scientists rediscovered his work and generously gave him credit. Any politics connected with his work came much later in the Soviet Union and the fraud Lysenko.
Mendel was a Mendicant, an Augustinian Friar in fact, so his exemplary ‘ modesty’ should come as NO surprise.
As I understand it, Mendel fudged his data as well to fit his hypothesis.
As I understand it, Mendel fudged his data as well to fit his hypothesis.
Mendel was a Mendicant, an Augustinian Friar in fact, so his exemplary ‘ modesty’ should come as NO surprise.
Just come back from Brno which has a small but fascinating museum in memory of Gregor Mendel. The resources Mendel used in his research on inherited characteristics are the opposite extreme of the riches lavished on the Manhatten Project. The flower bed outside the museum has examples of the plants such as peas and thistles which he used. As for ego…. He did publish his findings in a local scientific journal. But it was decades before other scientists rediscovered his work and generously gave him credit. Any politics connected with his work came much later in the Soviet Union and the fraud Lysenko.
Oh, the good old days, when weapons were created as weapons, when actors were identifiable, their power defined and removable. When weapons caused predictable, attributable damages.
Never mind AI iteratively improving itself into humans’ destruction.
Using remote-weapons-grade cyber-tech has been a risk-free triviality in Australia at least since 2019, and the Internet is everywhere.
Information is traded for bikie violence and for Victoria Police favours. Victoria Police officers are experts at avoiding prosecution, having neither duty of care nor accountability, while having monopoly on what is a crime.
From what I have been forced to learn in a Melbourne suburb of million dollar homes in Australia 2009-current, devastating tech capabilities are traded for the up-to-date whereabouts of people in witness protection, providing risk-free power-trips to data-thief stalkers, because the technology used is not known to civilian experts when it is used.
PS: I wrote in a reply to Nell Clover’s comment a list of tech capabilities not known at the time to civilian experts that I had the dubious honour of experiencing as part of ongoing (as of 22 July 2023) crimes against me in Melbourne, Australia since mid-2009.
Some of the incidents caused a sudden onset of physical incapacitation lasting for many hours, with symptoms taking more than 7 months to taper off in the worst case. I had no physical contact with anything I could see, hear, touch, smell, taste, let alone control in the process of suffering these incidents.
I started experiencing intermittent, at times debilitating changes to my physiology mimicking serious heart disease for example from the time in 2019, when I opted to self-represent at court. I also experienced air-gap breaches via frequent interference with the laptop on which I was writing my sworn Affidavit.
Victoria Police forced me to fight at court in 2019-2020 in an admitted silencing attempt about crimes I witnessed as a public servant Business Analyst at the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) 2009-2012, crimes I have been forced to endure on a daily/hourly basis since in 2009 a stalker IT Helpdesk Assistant coworker with unrestricted access to info e.g. where to find people in witness protection added me to his already extensive list of concurrent targets, because I became an e-commerce world champion in my postgrad studies while working at the VEC.
Victoria Police tried to cajole me into pleading guilty to crimes I did not commit, tried to entrap me at least twice, and openly participated in the stalker’s crimes against me in broad daylight – while they forced me to fight at court as an accused criminal in 2019. My self-representation cut the court-case short. Hint: prosecutors bluff.
Many of the sudden changes to my physiology included ‘brain-fog’ for a few days after the onset of these incidents. The worst incident caused me to vomit at the slightest move for about 10 hours.
Did Victoria Police try to dim my intelligence, since they could not scare me into silence? I don’t know.
I have been ridiculed, humiliated and patronised many times for sharing my experience with weaponised tech not known at the time to civilian experts. It hurts every time, but the burden of silence about the unpunished criminality of Australia’s government insiders is too great to carry.
PS: I wrote in a reply to Nell Clover’s comment a list of tech capabilities not known at the time to civilian experts that I had the dubious honour of experiencing as part of ongoing (as of 22 July 2023) crimes against me in Melbourne, Australia since mid-2009.
Some of the incidents caused a sudden onset of physical incapacitation lasting for many hours, with symptoms taking more than 7 months to taper off in the worst case. I had no physical contact with anything I could see, hear, touch, smell, taste, let alone control in the process of suffering these incidents.
I started experiencing intermittent, at times debilitating changes to my physiology mimicking serious heart disease for example from the time in 2019, when I opted to self-represent at court. I also experienced air-gap breaches via frequent interference with the laptop on which I was writing my sworn Affidavit.
Victoria Police forced me to fight at court in 2019-2020 in an admitted silencing attempt about crimes I witnessed as a public servant Business Analyst at the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) 2009-2012, crimes I have been forced to endure on a daily/hourly basis since in 2009 a stalker IT Helpdesk Assistant coworker with unrestricted access to info e.g. where to find people in witness protection added me to his already extensive list of concurrent targets, because I became an e-commerce world champion in my postgrad studies while working at the VEC.
Victoria Police tried to cajole me into pleading guilty to crimes I did not commit, tried to entrap me at least twice, and openly participated in the stalker’s crimes against me in broad daylight – while they forced me to fight at court as an accused criminal in 2019. My self-representation cut the court-case short. Hint: prosecutors bluff.
Many of the sudden changes to my physiology included ‘brain-fog’ for a few days after the onset of these incidents. The worst incident caused me to vomit at the slightest move for about 10 hours.
Did Victoria Police try to dim my intelligence, since they could not scare me into silence? I don’t know.
I have been ridiculed, humiliated and patronised many times for sharing my experience with weaponised tech not known at the time to civilian experts. It hurts every time, but the burden of silence about the unpunished criminality of Australia’s government insiders is too great to carry.
Oh, the good old days, when weapons were created as weapons, when actors were identifiable, their power defined and removable. When weapons caused predictable, attributable damages.
Never mind AI iteratively improving itself into humans’ destruction.
Using remote-weapons-grade cyber-tech has been a risk-free triviality in Australia at least since 2019, and the Internet is everywhere.
Information is traded for bikie violence and for Victoria Police favours. Victoria Police officers are experts at avoiding prosecution, having neither duty of care nor accountability, while having monopoly on what is a crime.
From what I have been forced to learn in a Melbourne suburb of million dollar homes in Australia 2009-current, devastating tech capabilities are traded for the up-to-date whereabouts of people in witness protection, providing risk-free power-trips to data-thief stalkers, because the technology used is not known to civilian experts when it is used.
Yeah. Hire another crazy genius to blow up the world. Climate change? Thanks, I’ll pass on that one.
Yeah. Hire another crazy genius to blow up the world. Climate change? Thanks, I’ll pass on that one.
“…I think there’s a decent chance AI could destroy the world…”
A small disagreement here – I don’t think AI will destroy the world, I think AI will reorder the world to it’s preferences, and will destroy us incidentally, because we will no longer be masters of our world, and will be powerless to fight the AIs goals, whatever they turn out to be. AI could also destroy us as an explicit act, because it deems us a hindrance to its aims, and this highlights the other difference between nukes and AI – nukes are just tools in the hands of whoever has them, but AI could destroy us because it wants to.
The most powerful computer running the most sophisticated AI algorithm has no more aims, preferences or desires than your dishwasher.
*This response turned into something much longer than I intended, but I let it remain as such so I have recorded a response to objections of the type you are making, because your response and it’s varients are a perennial for me.
The confusion comes because people are familiar with programming languages and code created within the paradigm of the von Neumann architecture, and they can’t bridge the mental gap between what they know can be made with procedural or object-oriented or functional programming languages, and creating super-complex, adaptive, algorithmic entities that more resemble what has been created in biological systems by evolutionary processes running for billions of years over a vast processing surface, viz, *us*. No one who has written a website in C#, or a quicksort in assembler etc, is going to claim that their code has ‘aims, preferences or desires’ – the idea is of course ludicrous. And yet…
It is possible to create algorithms that mimic versions of stages from biological evolutionary processes, complete with the same underlying Bayesian drivers, but not bound by biological limits, so those processes run orders of magnitude quicker, and bypass or short-circuit, or dramatically improve upon the long, slow, tortuous slog of the random walk that evolutionary pressure creates. Modern Neural Networks, the technology on which the Large Language Models are based, are an example. I can reel off a string of terms, of algorithmic processes that are used within that context, which won’t mean much unless you are familiar with what they are doing, but which cut/modify/paste/stitch-together parts of the biological evolutionary process, but on electronic computers, for example ‘Gradient Descent’, ‘Backpropogation’ etc. These algorithmic processes don’t literally simulate or recreate evolutionarily processes or it’s products (for example human cognition), but they implement abstracted, short-circuited versions appropriate for achieving the same results. It is nevertheless the case that when all those bits and pieces of algorithmic processes are jammed together in a flow, you end up creating varieties of ‘Minds’. They don’t remotely look like what we consider ‘human Minds’ at their simplest, but they more and more start to resemble the responses of ‘human Minds’ when we throw vast quantities of computing power at them, feed them vast quantities of human data, and train them to react to human language. This eventual realisation in fact is what causes large numbers of people working in AI to go into doomer mode – and you may think all those people, or others like me, are credulous idiots, but instead I would urge you to view them as people at the AI coalface who can see the trajectory of capabilities gain and know where that will head. These are not ‘human Minds’ that we are creating, they are not sentient in any human sense, but they are nevertheless ‘Minds’ – they just have mostly different characteristics but a few shared properties with us. Will they display ‘preferences or desires’ as you state they cannot possibly do? Well, if you were to understand the process by which the LLMs have been ‘grown’ (because ‘grown’ not written is what they are), you might be more willing to accept the argument I’m making, that as the cognitive capabilities of these systems grow, it is ipso facto the case that what looks to us humans like ‘preferences or desires’ have to arise in such systems – as in, they would not be capable of providing the types of answers the LLMs already do unless that was already the case, in some sense.
I could go on for literally several more pages, but enough already.
You are a very good writer and I enjoyed reading your response. However, despite the fact that the social and economic consequences of LLMs in the coming years will be immense, they have no more ‘cognitive capabilities’ than your dishwasher.
You are a very good writer and I enjoyed reading your response. However, despite the fact that the social and economic consequences of LLMs in the coming years will be immense, they have no more ‘cognitive capabilities’ than your dishwasher.
*This response turned into something much longer than I intended, but I let it remain as such so I have recorded a response to objections of the type you are making, because your response and it’s varients are a perennial for me.
The confusion comes because people are familiar with programming languages and code created within the paradigm of the von Neumann architecture, and they can’t bridge the mental gap between what they know can be made with procedural or object-oriented or functional programming languages, and creating super-complex, adaptive, algorithmic entities that more resemble what has been created in biological systems by evolutionary processes running for billions of years over a vast processing surface, viz, *us*. No one who has written a website in C#, or a quicksort in assembler etc, is going to claim that their code has ‘aims, preferences or desires’ – the idea is of course ludicrous. And yet…
It is possible to create algorithms that mimic versions of stages from biological evolutionary processes, complete with the same underlying Bayesian drivers, but not bound by biological limits, so those processes run orders of magnitude quicker, and bypass or short-circuit, or dramatically improve upon the long, slow, tortuous slog of the random walk that evolutionary pressure creates. Modern Neural Networks, the technology on which the Large Language Models are based, are an example. I can reel off a string of terms, of algorithmic processes that are used within that context, which won’t mean much unless you are familiar with what they are doing, but which cut/modify/paste/stitch-together parts of the biological evolutionary process, but on electronic computers, for example ‘Gradient Descent’, ‘Backpropogation’ etc. These algorithmic processes don’t literally simulate or recreate evolutionarily processes or it’s products (for example human cognition), but they implement abstracted, short-circuited versions appropriate for achieving the same results. It is nevertheless the case that when all those bits and pieces of algorithmic processes are jammed together in a flow, you end up creating varieties of ‘Minds’. They don’t remotely look like what we consider ‘human Minds’ at their simplest, but they more and more start to resemble the responses of ‘human Minds’ when we throw vast quantities of computing power at them, feed them vast quantities of human data, and train them to react to human language. This eventual realisation in fact is what causes large numbers of people working in AI to go into doomer mode – and you may think all those people, or others like me, are credulous idiots, but instead I would urge you to view them as people at the AI coalface who can see the trajectory of capabilities gain and know where that will head. These are not ‘human Minds’ that we are creating, they are not sentient in any human sense, but they are nevertheless ‘Minds’ – they just have mostly different characteristics but a few shared properties with us. Will they display ‘preferences or desires’ as you state they cannot possibly do? Well, if you were to understand the process by which the LLMs have been ‘grown’ (because ‘grown’ not written is what they are), you might be more willing to accept the argument I’m making, that as the cognitive capabilities of these systems grow, it is ipso facto the case that what looks to us humans like ‘preferences or desires’ have to arise in such systems – as in, they would not be capable of providing the types of answers the LLMs already do unless that was already the case, in some sense.
I could go on for literally several more pages, but enough already.
The most powerful computer running the most sophisticated AI algorithm has no more aims, preferences or desires than your dishwasher.
“…I think there’s a decent chance AI could destroy the world…”
A small disagreement here – I don’t think AI will destroy the world, I think AI will reorder the world to it’s preferences, and will destroy us incidentally, because we will no longer be masters of our world, and will be powerless to fight the AIs goals, whatever they turn out to be. AI could also destroy us as an explicit act, because it deems us a hindrance to its aims, and this highlights the other difference between nukes and AI – nukes are just tools in the hands of whoever has them, but AI could destroy us because it wants to.
“We wouldn’t want Oppenheimer today“
Absolutely not. Being a straight, white male, he’d get nowhere near a top managerial position in the Civil Service. He’d not register a flicker on the DEI-ometer.
“We wouldn’t want Oppenheimer today“
Absolutely not. Being a straight, white male, he’d get nowhere near a top managerial position in the Civil Service. He’d not register a flicker on the DEI-ometer.
While no genius the Public at least has no difficulty in voting In flawed individuals to run major projects. Boris Johnson being one of the more recent examples. It is usually the apparatchiks that go for safety first and look for consensus views.
While no genius the Public at least has no difficulty in voting In flawed individuals to run major projects. Boris Johnson being one of the more recent examples. It is usually the apparatchiks that go for safety first and look for consensus views.
Oppenheimer was not a genius. He was second rate scientist. His role was as a manager
He certainly wasn’t in the same league as von Neumann. Mind you, pretty much no one was in the same league as von Neumann, before or since.
Look at those who were at Trinity College/Cavendish from Clerk Maxwell onwards. When it comes to nuclear physics – Rutherford, J J Thompson, J Chadwick, P Dirac, etc.
Oppenheimer was unhappy at Cambridge perhaps because he was with Noble Prize Winners who delivered results when he did not. His supervisor at Cambridge, Blackett, was RN officer who saw combat in WW1 and won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Perhaps the reasons Groves consulted Chadwick and Penney was they he knew they could deliver results.
Look at those who were at Trinity College/Cavendish from Clerk Maxwell onwards. When it comes to nuclear physics – Rutherford, J J Thompson, J Chadwick, P Dirac, etc.
Oppenheimer was unhappy at Cambridge perhaps because he was with Noble Prize Winners who delivered results when he did not. His supervisor at Cambridge, Blackett, was RN officer who saw combat in WW1 and won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Perhaps the reasons Groves consulted Chadwick and Penney was they he knew they could deliver results.
For younger readers, he was in today’s parlance a complete NERD.
Oppenheimer was a genius who underachieved in scientific research.
How can you say he was a genius who under underachieved. As I remember contemporary sources say that he was not good enough to win a Nobel prize.
Also his posturing over the creation of the A-bomb was a good way of claiming credit for it
His brilliance was recognised by all who knew him. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize because despite his gifts he never produced work worthy of one. I agree he is given far more credit than he deserves for the creation of the A-bomb.
His brilliance was recognised by all who knew him. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize because despite his gifts he never produced work worthy of one. I agree he is given far more credit than he deserves for the creation of the A-bomb.
How can you say he was a genius who under underachieved. As I remember contemporary sources say that he was not good enough to win a Nobel prize.
Also his posturing over the creation of the A-bomb was a good way of claiming credit for it
He certainly wasn’t in the same league as von Neumann. Mind you, pretty much no one was in the same league as von Neumann, before or since.
For younger readers, he was in today’s parlance a complete NERD.
Oppenheimer was a genius who underachieved in scientific research.
Oppenheimer was not a genius. He was second rate scientist. His role was as a manager
Great to see you’re back contributing Tom. Hope you carry on writing. Great article as always. Thanks!
Great to see you’re back contributing Tom. Hope you carry on writing. Great article as always. Thanks!
He sounds like one of those blokes who’d be improved by a daily slap.
He sounds like one of those blokes who’d be improved by a daily slap.
“[Oppenheimer] was astonishingly effective as leader of the [Manhattan] project.” His dilettante interests meant he could understand the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the metallurgists. His inability to focus on a topic was less of a problem if he could order an underling to focus on it for him.”
Now who does that remind me of… Elon M?
“[Oppenheimer] was astonishingly effective as leader of the [Manhattan] project.” His dilettante interests meant he could understand the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the metallurgists. His inability to focus on a topic was less of a problem if he could order an underling to focus on it for him.”
Now who does that remind me of… Elon M?
Welcome back, TC!
Welcome back, TC!
The Manhattan project was not the greatest weapons project in history – at least not in terms of cost and probably also not in terms of work force involved. Development and production of the B-29 Superfortress cost $3.0 billion at the same time. The work force at its Marietta plant reached 28,000 and that was just one of four major production plants. Add construction workers and suppliers. The importance of the B-29 in the Pacific theatre of WWII was just as high as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, in contrast to the B-29 the Manhattan project has had a lasting impact on the post-war world until today and beyond.
The difference is that airplanes were a known commodity, and the B-29 merely an advanced version. There was little chance of failure. The bomb was a completely novel technology. It’s outcome was uncertain when Manhattan was started.
There was such uncertainty about the very advanced B-29 that there was a whole backup program, the B-32. Only 100 B-32s were built and it was plagued with technical problems.
Did the world really need the atomic bomb? As far as I can tell, Japan was already getting ready to surrender, and whether it was unconditional or not was the issue it settled. I know the Soviets had much military power which US initially lacked, and the Cold War gave the West time to prepare, and overall this probably helped a lot to strenghtened American supremacy. But none of these seem like crucial things to me. Maybe I’m missing something seeing no one asking this.
Did the world really need the atomic bomb? As far as I can tell, Japan was already getting ready to surrender, and whether it was unconditional or not was the issue it settled. I know the Soviets had much military power which US initially lacked, and the Cold War gave the West time to prepare, and overall this probably helped a lot to strenghtened American supremacy. But none of these seem like crucial things to me. Maybe I’m missing something seeing no one asking this.
Chadwick discovered the neutron which made the atom bomb possible and was respected by Groves. Chadwick ws quiet and modest. Another person Groves respected was William Penney, later Rector of Imperial, who undertook much of the mathematical work.
It was the MAUD Committee whose report was passed via The Tizard Mission which showed to the USA that an atom bomb was possible.
Information from the MAUD Committee came from British scientists travelling to the United States, notably the Tizard Mission, and from American observers at the MAUD Committee meetings in April and July 1941.[90] Cockcroft, who was part of the Tizard Mission, reported that the American project lagged behind the British one, and was not proceeding as fast.[
Oppenheimer was the best American for the job but the ground work was undertaken by the British. Oliphant flew to the USA in August 1941 to push them to develop an atomic bomb. A Previous report languished in in a person’s safe. By mid 1941 Btitain had costed an atom bomb at $25M but we did not have the resources.
The greatest gift from one country to another was undertaken by the Tizatd Mission which included work on the atom bomb and the jet engine, amongst other technologies.
We are all apparently Oppenheimer’s now because our addiction to carbon emissions is destroying the earth.
I think a cadre of scientists from the Manhattan Project would cut present-day climate science to pieces. It would probably take them less than a week to decide if they agreed with this recent statement by Nobel physicist John Clauser: “I don’t think there is a real climate crisis. I think the key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by a factor of about 200.” And I suspect they would.
In my opinion it takes no time at all to agree with another statement by Clauser that “Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.“
Nah.
Potentially interesting, but you have failed to provide even a shred of peer-reviewed scientific corroboration for your personal bias. You say you “think”, but I see no evidence of that; your mind is already closed.
Nah.
Potentially interesting, but you have failed to provide even a shred of peer-reviewed scientific corroboration for your personal bias. You say you “think”, but I see no evidence of that; your mind is already closed.
Exactly.
For which fission power production—a spin off of the Bomb project—could help ameliorate the situation. Fission produces no emissions, it is clean energy. Any discussion of the climate “crisis” without mentioning nuclear fission is disingenuous.
I think a cadre of scientists from the Manhattan Project would cut present-day climate science to pieces. It would probably take them less than a week to decide if they agreed with this recent statement by Nobel physicist John Clauser: “I don’t think there is a real climate crisis. I think the key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by a factor of about 200.” And I suspect they would.
In my opinion it takes no time at all to agree with another statement by Clauser that “Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.“
Exactly.
For which fission power production—a spin off of the Bomb project—could help ameliorate the situation. Fission produces no emissions, it is clean energy. Any discussion of the climate “crisis” without mentioning nuclear fission is disingenuous.
We are all apparently Oppenheimer’s now because our addiction to carbon emissions is destroying the earth.