Word: feynman
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Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote. "And I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless...
...Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman's pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin's Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either. Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while, dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal...
That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman's vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism--a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom...
...gliding the 100-ton shuttle into Kennedy rather than onto the dry lake beds at Ed wards Air Force Base in the California desert "may be a wonderful political policy," Young wrote his NASA bosses in January, "it is not an intelligent technical policy." Shuttle Inquiry Commission Member Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate, charged last week that the shuttle blew up because of "hopeless" design flaws in the booster. He blamed "attitudinal problems" in NASA's management...
...community was created in the high-altitude desert of Los Alamos, N.M., and hundreds of scientists were shipped in. A physics Dream Team was assembled: Teller, Hans Bethe, and Richard Feynman, among others. The heavy responsibility of overseeing these great minds and building the bomb wore away at Oppenheimer. Two years in, he only carried a gaunt 115 pounds on a 5-foot-10-inch frame, and his four-to-five pack-a-day cigarette habit did not help his health. These chapters in the book center on the physicists’ lives while leaving the scientific aspects...