Oppenheimer was a genius, but his superpower was being good at both theoretical and practical physics. He did Nobel-prize level work and also ran the Manhattan Project. I think that’s comparable to getting the gold medal at the Olympics for 2 different sports.
General Leslie Groves thought very highly of Oppenheimer, and if you got the stamp of approval from Groves, you were doing something right.
Oppenheimer was dragged through the mud during the red scare and his name is still tarnished because of that. It is ironic and a little sad that he was awarded the Fermi medal once his name was finally cleared because Fermi worked for him during the Manhattan Project. It probably would have been the Oppenheimer Medal if it weren’t for Senator McCarthy.
Oppenheimer beat Heisenberg (also a pretty smart guy) to the bomb and not by a little either. And thank whatever higher power is out there he did.
(I am reusing most of my comment from a different story)
From Feynman`s biography, on trying to separate the isotopes of uranium:
> It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men (Oppenheimer, Compton, Tolman, Smyth, Urey, and Rabi) could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
I think this has a lot to do in interest in the topic. It's a lot easier to be engaged when changing the fate of the world than when sitting through another "who is doing what part of the data migration" meeting. Just something to keep in mind.
> Oppenheimer was dragged through the mud during the red scare and his name is still tarnished because of that. It is ironic and a little sad that he was awarded the Fermi medal once his name was finally cleared because Fermi worked for him during the Manhattan Project.
It's ironic to me that this is the first time I'm hearing that he was caught up in the red scare. I mean I'm no historian but apparently didn't tarnish his name all that much! :-)
Generally speaking, I don't believe anybody's name was permanently tarnished by the red scare, because it turned out to be such an utter farce of a witch hunt.
But, at the time, it of course did derail careers and destroy lives.
That's a simplistic outlook. Oppenheimer was a celebrated leader of the team that invented the bomb that ended the war... and then, very publicly, had his security clearance revoked and was basically dragged through the mud by the government that benefitted from his work and elevated him over others.
I would more equate it with someone being very publicly arrested for a horrible crime, only for the verdict to result in "not guilty" or the case dropped before going to court. You know, like OJ or MJ.
Also worth noting the impact/risk of leaking nuclear secrets would mean that if you thought there was a 1% chance someone was a spy you can’t ignore that.
Even more they believed that the fascists had to be tamed. First the German fascists, but then the root of it all, the US fascists with their Hitler support and their genocidal anti-socialist world-domination program, bringing fascism to the whole world.
I wouldn't call that betrayal, you could rather argue that the US fascists betrayed the oldest democracy.
Even Oppenheimer, who was a stance Anti-Stalinist and the liberal under the fascist security clique, had the very same view and motivation. Just from the far right.
Went through your list. I didn’t get the sense of deep belief in communism nor antiamericanism. There seemed to be other incentives. Is there a good example?
Not OP, but I would recommend on this subject a podcast I've talked about in a previous comment [1], about the life or Hoover and the red scare in light of declassified knowledge of soviet spies in the US.
I don't think you studied either Klaus Fuchs or the Rosenbergs in much detail then. Whatever the merits of their actions or the cases against them, they were certainly dedicated Communists who did their best for a cause they believed in fervently.
Political Officer: “And the seventh angel poured his bowl into the air, and a voice cried out from heaven, saying: "It is done." A man with your responsibilities reading about the end of the world. And what's this? "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."”
Captain Ramius: “It is an ancient Hindu text, quoted by an American.”
Political Officer: “An American?”
Captain Ramius: “Mmm. He invented the atomic bomb. And was later accused of being a communist.”
--The Hunt for Red October (1990 movie, not sure its in the book)
Anecdotally, I've only ever heard the name Fermi in the phrase Fermi Paradox. Oppenheimer I know much more about, and I only know there's a movie about him because it's all over HN this month.
I'm sure that the red scare did tarnish his name for decades, but it looks to me like those decades had ended by 2004 when Google's trends pick up.
Other way around for me "Fermion" "Fermi-Dirac Statistics" "Fermi Energy Level" etc. There are a lot of things in physics named after Fermi not aware of anything named after Oppenheimer.
It clearly depends on where do you live. In Italy, Fermi is mostly known, instead of Oppenheimer, as one of the creator of the atomic bomb.
It feels like another Marconi/Bell case.
I think this is actually evidence of what the poster above is referring to - the long-term effects of Oppenheimer being unfairly discredited. Fermi has streets, schools and subway stations named after him all over Italy. Oppenheimer doesn't (at least not to anywhere near the same extent), even in the US, because during the period when this might most likely have happened, towards the end of his life and shortly after his death, he was still widely regarded as being a traitor.
I'm a Japanese, Oppenhiemer isn't much famous name IMO, though his name may be written in textbook. How Manhattan project succeeded great is a minor topic in general. It's somewhat famous that Einstein encouraged developing of nuke and finally against for bombing. Fermi is somewhat famous for Fermi estimate.
Anyone who has ever pondered the existence of extraterrestrial life has heard of Fermi's paradox, while only history buffs interested in WWII or Japan or the Second Red Scare or alternatively science geeks interested in nuclear explosives have ever heard of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Aren't there more people who are seriously interested in and studying WWII history than there are people who are seriously interested in and studying extraterrestrial life?
For me it was absolutely Fermi. And Feynman and Teller. But Oppenheimer definitely up there.
Oh also Leo fucking Szilard! From wikipedia ...
> He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.
“In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded by the resumption of nuclear testing, and he is reminded that Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell at the first hurdle.”
‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’, Billy Bragg 1988
We are not talking about the red scare farce (which really was political opposition to his "candor" policies and H-bomb program/genocidal opposition), but we they/are talking why he didn't win the Nobel, even when he did brilliant and ground breaking work.
He was considered the most brilliant theoreticist behind Dirac, Schroedinger, Bohr, Pauli and Heisenberg in Goettingen and early Berkeley years. But then he didn't push out that many papers as before, so he didn't win the Nobel as all his other colleagues, below him. He should have won it for the black hole paper at least, but that was too advanced and too theoretical for those folks then. Instead he was an extremely good teacher, manager and later politician, which was more important than advancing physics. E.g. Bethe and many of his students surpassed him in physics, and he was happy with delegation. This article mentions most of it, the book goes far deeper.
Public perception doesn't change at the snap of a finger. I'm sure there are plenty of people alive today who grew up thinking "Oppenheimer bad" and would possibly perpetuate that perception down the generational line.
> Public perception doesn't change at the snap of a finger. I'm sure there are plenty of people alive today who grew up thinking "Oppenheimer bad" and would possibly perpetuate that perception down the generational line.
I had a vague understanding that he had a bad reputation, but always assumed it came from more of an "anti-nuclear activist" angle (because he was responsible for making nuclear weapons real).
The knowledge of hindsight can be a curse. Don't forget that Oppenheimer is to a certain extent seen as the guy who is responsible of giving humanity the tools to kill itself a thousand times over.
The fact that we didn't is good luck, but it could have gone different during many points in the cold war and then you and I wouldn't be able to discuss about this on here. But if you knew about Oppenheimer and still were alive you would probably not think highly of the man.
So it doesn't have to do with anti-nuclear (as in: against civil nuclear use) — Oppenheimer was just the prototypical smart guy that failed to predict the consequences of his own actions and by that nearly ended humanity. This makes him an ethically ambivalent figure, and that ambivalence has become a defining trait of the public image of Oppenheimer.
> So it doesn't have to do with anti-nuclear (as in: against civil nuclear use)
That's not my understanding. I don't think you have anti-nuclear activists that are totes fine nuclear weapons and just don't like powerplants. The activists who oppose civil nuclear use are a strict subset of a broader anti-nuclear activist set that includes nuclear disarmament.
> The anti-nuclear movement is a social movement that opposes various nuclear technologies....Major anti-nuclear groups include Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Peace Action, Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. The initial objective of the movement was nuclear disarmament, though since the late 1960s opposition has included the use of nuclear power. Many anti-nuclear groups oppose both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
This has been especially common in my home country Sweden,
where these labels were used by the political and media elite to put down the grass roots movement trying to stop mass migration from Africa and the Middle East.
You can be opposed to mass migration from under developed countries without being a xenophobe(fascist or otherwise) , with vastly different cultural norms.
The last 2-3 decades of migration to Sweden has been disastrous and was done against the majority’s will, with gang violence extreme segregation and a diminished social cohesion.
Funny, I remember the days when swedish biker gangs pillaged the cold war era reservist weapon depots to wage their gang wars, using weapons of war. No immigartion was needed back then.
But thanks for confirming that most right wing ideology is simply rooted in peoples incapability to cope with change.
“Strommer said Sweden's sixty shooting deaths this year compared to four in Norway, four in Denmark and two in Finland. The deaths are the tip of an iceberg of violence and organised crime that have put down deep roots in parts of society, Strommer said.
Last year, 45 people were shot dead in Sweden. In 2012, the total was 17, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.”
I cope well with change.
I no longer live in Sweden but I still mourn what happened to my country and what could have been. So much wasted opportunity
Qualified 'yes' - it's more due to recent changes in culture, Sweden has had immigrants for a long time.
Mostly by younger (18 and under) swedes with no prospects thanks to increased economic kettling (segregation) being used by more established swedish criminal gangs as young hitters serve reduced time and are seen as disposable people.
Driven by an increase in black market weapon availability and a criminal culture change away from shooting others in the leg and now shooting to kill.
So, a problem of integration, and not necessarily one of, how did you put it, "mass migration from arab countries and africa".
And those social problems, integration of new citizens and migrants, are much more complex than "stop migration". Because even if you did, what's next? Throwing all those people out that are already there? Also those born there (not just Sweden, in Germany it is the same, not to start with France), or just those without proper passports? Everyone, regardless of passport?
Or, radical idea, just find a way to successfully integrate everyone in society, even if it means the existing society will have to change.
Another radical idea: don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
In which country has importing millions of uneducated people with a diametrically different culture actually worked out?
I have lived in two highly functional multi cultural societies:
Dubai(UAE) for two years, although predominantly muslim people from all over the planet seem to get more or less along.
The Emiratis rule with an iron fist, and that seems to do the trick. You even think about joining a violent gang, you’re sent to some prison dungeon for years before being kicked out.
Although I’m sure the same deal would work out well in Sweden which is in general also an authoritarian nation(although they prentend otherwise), I doubt this is what most proponents of multi culturalism envision.
Now I live in Switzerland, a nation that has three distinct cultures for hundreds of years and seem to integrate foreigners from all over the world very well(though not without problems). The difference between Switzerland and Sweden/Germany/France is the system of direct democracy (where every poor decision can be quickly reverted), in general a bottom up decentralized approach and just as important, you have to QUALIFY YOURSELF to gain residence, and to gain citizenship is difficult(and can be revoked).
Wow, you bring up the UAE as good example? You are aware that they basically enslaving their non-domestic, unskilled workforce? If that is your understanding, or view, on human rights and diversity, well, we can stop here.
Also, all rigjt wing people always bring up Switzerland and direct democracy up. Until, that is, the majority opposses whatever those right wingers want. Good luck in Switzerland so.
Please try not to misinterpret what my views are - I’m not your enemy.
Yes, _Dubai_(not UAE) is a good example of a functioning multi cultural society - bear in mind UAE consists of 7 different Emirates, all very different places, independently governed.
Hardly perfect, but it’s one of the best examples of multi cultural societies I’ve witnessed.
And you hardly have to be a right winger to like Switzerland - and I find it interesting you think direct democracy is a right wing virtue - wasn’t power to the people what the left used to fight for?
And what’s your best example of a multi cultural country?
Well, not one that has actuap slave labour, like Dubai. Among a ton of other human rights violations. Switzerland gets close enough, and my point was the fact in Germany swiss direct democracy is constantly brought up by, e.g., the AfD. Until, that is, a majority actually supports stuff like gay marriage, then all.of a sudden democracy is a lot less interesting.
That you did not see how low skilled labour in Dubai is treated, housed in ghettos, passports withheld and labor contracts sold, is a pitty. And advocating for Dubai style enforcement against "violant gangs", your point, is hardly something that is compatible with western democracy and freedom as written (in spirit it is getting erroded on a daily basis lately).
Germany is another example, e.g. Berlin, despute what media would make you believe.
Switzerland is, like most European countries, a nice place for qualified folks, preferably white. Poor non-whites, well, all.of a sudden things are less rosey. Still better then elsewhere, but place for improvement.
Mass migration from the middle east and africa so is not necessarily an unsolvable problem, Germany took loads of refugees, up to the point it anbaled the AfD and extreme right, but there were hardly any problems with it. Integration is lacking, but that is, as I said, a point for both, newcomers and those already there. If newcomers are basically marginalized, one doesn't have to wonder crime is a result. Or frustration (France shows this with their problems integrating 2-4 th generation people in their banlieues).
And power to the people, I am all for it. One has to be vigilant so that the means of handing power to the people are not abused by populists and extremists, and ultimately abolished. History has examples of how that happens, we should avoid allowing it again.
I believe I understand Dubai a lot better than you do. Have you been there?
I worked closely with the laborers from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India for two years, installing heavy machinery.
In general, they are not badly treated at all. Their living conditions are closer to being in the army. Dubai has done a lot to stamp out bad actors. Taking the passport is now illegal (though it still sometimes happens).
One foreman had saved up 250,000 Dirhams and intended to start and electrical contractor company back home in Pakistan.
People from Western Europe seem to think 99% of these guys are slaves - they are not. They go to Dubai to get some of that sweet oil money.
It if mass migration from the Middle East and Africa is not an unsolvable problem(just really really hard), why bother? What is the advantage?
Further, I don’t agree that there should be any limits what power the people has.
I want 100% direct democracy(naturally with a guiding constitution, that can be changed)
So it's "either you agree with me or you're a bigot".
Calling Swedes hateful is a joke, they are the nicest and most tolerant people you will find. Leaving 0 middle ground and creating a dichotomy of either "on our side or a nazi" is precisely what is causing so much division in western societies.
These words mean nothing anymore, all "racist" means now is just someone who you don't agree with.
Same is happening here in Finland now in full force. It’s scary and fascinating to watch, I hope it gets studied a bit deeper so we know what makes people act like that.
How about "people don't like foreigners and strangers"? Most societies in human history have been that way. Even chimpanzees kill members of other groups by default when they find them alone.
1. Chimps also kill to dominate, is that now an acceptable behavior for people?
We aren't animals.
2. If you don't like foreigners you're a bigot and terrible person.
Hating someone because of where they are from is illogical because not all people from a specific location act and think the same. Therefore your hatred has no specific valid target.
I'm not saying anything about what behavior is "acceptable" or endorsing anything. I'm saying that people and animals have been acting that way for a very long time. Tolerance for strangers is more in need of sociological explanation than the opposite. Certainly, the trend towards tolerance exists and is rising over the course of history, which I very much like. It's about asking what the default state is from which society makes "progress".
Or are you disputing the historical claim that humans on average have never been more tolerant towards strangers than today?
I'm saying that people and animals have been acting that way for a very long time
So?
Just because people have done something for a long time doesn't mean it's right.
Or are you disputing the historical claim that humans on average have never been more tolerant towards strangers than today?
This seems like it is true but what's the evidence for this claim and why are you asking if I dispute it? Where did I say anything about changes in tolerance over time?
Tolerance for strangers is more in need of sociological explanation than the opposite
Why? What if humanity over time grows and learns thanks to our ability to store information, like in books.
More importantly why do we need an explanation and why does it matter?
If you are trying to use the fact that something happened for most of human history then changed recently and that makes it abnormal. Think slavery, rape, woman's right, etc
I'm saying that people and animals have been acting that way for a very long time. Tolerance for strangers is more in need of sociological explanation than the opposite. Certainly, the trend towards tolerance exists and is rising over the course of history, which I very much like. It's about asking what the default state is from which society makes "progress".
You're asking what the default state is? I assume you mean instincts right?
Oh yes... Sweden. Political party initiated by a literal SS soldier, keeps having to kick out members for nazi salutes and similar stuff, but calling them fascists makes you offended...
The same government that wants to revoke citizenships and permanent residence permits. Yup, calling them fascists is an abuse of the word. Hahahaha.
I intentionally didn’t mention the Sweden Democrats.
You were branded a fascist, racist, etc. if you spoke up, no matter your political allegiance.
You’re just making my point for me.
A majority of Swedes have been opposed to this insanity, not just the Sweden Democrats.
Sadly voting for them is the only option for anyone who understands what a disaster this is(unless you do like me, decide to move out).
You seem out of touch with what the government in sweden has been doing so far.
I agree that there are big social problems in Sweden. But I don't see how sending Kurds to die in Turkey; and generally blaming every problem that exist on immigrants while doing nothing to address said problems, will solve anything.
No need for ad hominem attacks - I’ve followed Swedish politics all my life.
I’ve never argued for sending Kurds to turkey, and I’m not blaming Swedens problems on any immigrants - they are completely self made by self centered so called leaders and a gullible populace who has had little exposure to the outside world.
>Since 2020, the ADL had described racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges White people.”
It's a powerful word that can be used to shut people down, so it is liberally used to do so, and its definition is changing to suit the policies and objectives of politicians and organizations.
One example: during the pandemic it was considered "racist" to suggest that the virus might have come from a lab, if you don't believe me I can find you a million reddit threads, Twitter threads, and articles saying as much. NOW it is openly talked about by government institutions and those same institutions that were writing articles decrying it as racist.
I fail to see how talking about the definitions of words and their power makes me a fascist. If anything you are the fascist for misusing the power of certain words to stifle discussion and the free exchange of ideas.
They don't claim that the words don't have a meaning. They just changed the meaning so that now they are "offending". And offence is a crime for which you can go to jail. So calling someone a nazi can land you in jail.
This is very out of touch with the current zeitgeist. You have real politicians (not Randoms on the internet) in the US who are hinting that fascism is not bad or may even be the answer.
Additionally, you have elected federal politicians in the US calling people communists.
Can you still use that as saber rattling when your favorite guy is a Putin bootlicker?
God. If my grandparents saw what being a republican would become in thirty short years I don’t know if they’d be able to take it. Reagan republicans would probably shoot the lot of them.
There seems to be no level of hypocrisy to which they will not rise and claim excuses and conspiratorial reasons for. I have heard from those sorts, among other things that "Putin is a great capitalist".
I heard the term 'commie pinko sympathizers' a number of times (not at home, in media and public) as a child and only a couple of them were being ironic.
Both Sweden and Finland joined NATO with the goal of increasing army spending and reducing it on the social programs.
Better to give money to USA to buy one F22 and to complain about darkies being criminals, than to put money to education so that criminality isn't the only route out of poverty right? /s
And of course in Sweden the schools where the residents are poor get less money, aren't as good, and it's much more difficult for their students to be accepted into a university.
What? There's generally an adjustment to the funding for schools in Sweden depending on socio-economic factors, so if anything schools where more residents are poor get more money.
Visceral violent hate of 'heretics' and 'pagans' has less to do with Western civilization and more to do with human nature's propension to identify with a tribe and consider everyone outside the tribe as a threat until proven otherwise.
That propension didn't appear randomly either, it is the result of millenias of hard lessons learned where those outside tribes were indeed threats.
That learned behavior still dictates our actions today, except for some of us, the notion of "tribe" has been enlarged to include a vast number of people, or, for the most idealistic, the entire planet.
> except for some of us, the notion of "tribe" has been enlarged to include a vast number of people
By "some of us", do you mean people of European heritage? China, Russia, Israel, and most of Africa are incredibly xenophobic.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Using a throwaway account to make a needlessly incendiary comment is unproductive. If you're not willing to put your main identity behind a comment, maybe consider if it needs to be rephrased rather than hiding behind a throwaway.
>And thank whatever higher power is out there he did.
This. I am so glad Americans killed ~200k mostly Japanese civilians when Japan was already militarily crippled and Germany capitulated three months prior.
“Militarily crippled” makes it sound like the US campaign was getting easier. It was not. Military casualties were getting higher every single fight. Civilian casualties were jaw dropping. Japanese civilians were committing mass suicide or making suicidal charges against marines while carrying sticks. Saipan and Okinawa invasions were humanitarian disasters, despite US forces best efforts.
The ethics of strategic bombing in general and nuclear bombing in particular are rightly debated, but you should bring better facts and understanding when touching such an incandescent topic.
What do you mean ethics? Of murdering people? I am to this day baffled by American people justifying the use of nuclear bomb and try to make it sound like it saved people. Stop!
Just frigging say we did it and we won the war simple as that.
Maybe a simplistic black and white reductionist view is not the best way to understand and contextualize a historic event. I am to this day baffled by people that refuse to engage in any kind of nuance for something as complex as a war involving the majority of the globe.
"Oh you do not understand it was complicated"? I think what you are saying is just creating another excuse to justify the bombing. As complex as it is at the end of the day you are making a decision to nuke a nation. Do you think Russia should have used it on Ukraine by now?
I think it is a fact of life that atrocities happen during war. Just admit it and say that this was one of them. Do not give me the "This was for the betterment of the world" BS.
>I think it is a fact of life that atrocities happen during war
No need to debate ethics. Shooting someone with a gun, killing them in a concentration camp, using an atomic bomb on them, bayoneting them. Just admit they are all bad. All sides are the same and it is BS for the US or Nazis or Imperial Japan or anyone to say anything was "for the betterment of the world".
- Option 1: Drop nuclear bombs on Japan, kill 200 000 people, end the war right there.
- Option 2: Continue as is and let 400 000 people die every month.
Which option do you prefer?
There's an argument that Japan was ready to surrender. When? In a month? Two? Three?
Wow were you able to see the future?
There is a name for what you are saying but I do not remember what it is called false dichotomy?
- Option 1: Kill 200k.
- Option 2: Do not kill 200k
That's where you go wrong - you see the nuclear bombing of Japan as an isolated event. Place it into the context of several hundred thousand people dying every month as it was at the time, and it will look different.
It feels very strange to read the level of willful ignorance displayed by objektif on hackernews. To ignore the context that the Pacific theater was 4.5 years of the most brutal fighting of the war, a mountain of experience demonstrating the Japanese resolve to never surrender, and the looming land invasion of Japan that at the time was predicted to likely kill 1,000,000+ US soldiers and many times more Japanese civilians is so disconnected from reality.
I would also argue that the use of those bombs saved many more lives by teaching the world a lesson about the horror of nuclear weapons. Its very possible that nuclear weapons would have been used in future conflicts when they would have been much more prevalent had it not been for the example set in WWII.
> Saipan and Okinawa invasions were humanitarian disasters, despite US forces best efforts.
How is that the Japanese's fault? The US invaded.
Americans always justify the genocide by saying "we had to bomb them otherwise we would have killed more of them by conventional means"... Well maybe don't kill them?
Japan knew it was beaten, but Roosevelt insisted on unconditional surrender. A negotiated peace would have been better for everyone especially since the Americans kept the emperor, which was the principal condition the Japanese wanted.
Bwaha. Japan attacked the US first. Japan refused to actually surrender until the second nuke. Japan was planning mass wave civilian attacks if there was any landings. Japan was refusing to surrender despite mass firebombings on the Japanese capital that were killing more than the nukes did.
Hell, even when the Japanese emperor finally tried to surrender, his own military cabinet tried to stop him.
It’s like hitler in his bunker. He only finally gave up when essentially everyone else was dead and/or the fight was completely, literally, impossible.
Sarcasm is cheap, even when a point is indisputable. But when a point is heavily under dispute it comes across as a lack of understanding. While Japan was losing the war they were far from crippled, and had shown that they were willing to continue fighting despite the "partial" destruction of many cities by that point.
If you have not watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War then it provides an interesting point of view to counter the simplistic "the war was already over we only did it to scare the russians" viewpoint.
Japan was crippled, on every front. By then, it was just a question of when they surrender and not if. By the way, the USSR declaring war on Japan played an equally large role in Japans surrender to the Western Allies as the atomic bombs did.
It is funny so, how many people still fail to see the targeted and indiscriminate bombing of civilians done during WW2 by the allies as the war crime it was. Heck, even the RAF bomber command addmitted that in internal memos.
>it was just a question of when they surrender and not if
You are glossing over this as if it means nothing. The "when" is incredibly important during an active war. Would the "when" be after an American invasion? Taking Okinawa killed 12,500 Americans, 77,000 Japanese military, and at least 100,000 Japanese civilians. That was less than 2 months before the dropping of the atomic bombs. If didn't Japan surrender then, how many more of those battles would it have taken to produce the "when" of a Japanese surrender? How many battles on the Russian side in Manchuria would it have taken? Not only had Japan never surrendered in it's entire 2,000 year plus history, no military unit had surrendered during the entire war. There was organized coup attempted literally the night before the surrender was broadcast and Prime Minister Suzuki, who had survived a different assassination attempt 9 years earlier, only escaped by minutes. Prime Ministers that were not ultranationalist enough had been assassinated in 1921 and 1930, with two former Prime Ministers dying during another coup attempt in 1936.
The casual confidence in the outcome of the war is so disconnected from reality that it is laughable. Japanese political surrender, and that surrender being followed by the military was not in any way, some sort of forgone conclusion.
So? We talk WW2, military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? Just look at Soviet and Russian casualties on the Eastern front. Also, as an alternative to an invasion mainland Japan, cut them of by sea, bomb their cities to dust (still a war crime, but Tokyo was already fire bombed anyway), so basically what happened, atomic bombs or not.
And yes, tze end of WW2 was predictable in mid 1944, no doubt about that in any shape or form. The details were up for grabs, sure, the overall outcome was not.
>military casualties were to be expected, weren't they?
First, convenient to ignore the 100,000 civilian deaths. Second, what you are saying is the war was basically won*
*After hundreds of thousands of additional military deaths fighting to completely dismantle Japan.
>The details were up for grabs
Again, these "details" are hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. You are acting like death from atomic bombs are the only deaths that matter, so people that die during battle or millions of deaths from starvation from a blockade[1] are fine. This is just so divorced from reality I don't even understand what you are trying to say. Yeah, we could have just killed millions Japanese people with a blockade or kill 100,000 Americans and a million Japanese during an invasion. Atomic weapons were totally unneeded.
We're closing in on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II.
To put that in perspective, the Civil War ended 80 years prior to that. We are almost as far removed from WWII as WWII is from the Civil War. While there are still people alive today who were alive during WWII, we're talking about people like Joe Biden, who is 80, who was 3 when it ended.
It if very likely that no one who served is still alive. Our fathers and grandfathers are the ones who had fathers and grandfathers serve.
All of our information about World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is from stuff written about it. Something told to someone who then told it to us. So of course there's a disconnect.
But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Japan lost the war in the Pacific by then (the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage).
The USSR entered war, but had yet to actively fight imperial Japan (while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest). Also, Germany had lost, and most of the troops and resources bound in Europe could be redeployed now.
Re atomic bombs: The enemy so was only the US (in practical terms, the other allies did not play a major role, except the fighting in India that Japan had already lost a year prior), and yes, the atomic bombs were devastating.
But Hihoroto himself said, it was much more than just the two atomic bombs being dropped.
Go check out Sean McMeekin's Stalin's War for a pithy rebuttal to this point of view - but the idea that Soviet entry was a equal reason to the atomic bomb is a minority view (at best saying it nicely) in the historical community, but rather a very successful propaganda effort that Stalin launched shortly after the war to justify his taking of larger portions of asia.
Ah, the guy who claimed WW2 was a Stalin and not an Axis thing? Well, that is a minority view at best. At worst, it is repeating a bunch Nazi appologist views about the whole affaire. Heck, he even claims a seperate UK-Germany peace after the Battle of France was a potential thing, talking fringe theories ignoring historical facts here...
But hey, if ypu need to justify the use of WMDs against civilians, every excuse is a good one I guess.
Both Hitler and Stalin believed a separate peace was possible - and if Halifax or Chamberlain led the government, rather then Churchill, and if Churchill had actually been open to the communication with the Nazis that met his famous quote that if he thought he could get out of it by only giving up Gibraltar he would, the story might be different. Hitler was gobstocked.
Your claim Sean as a Nazi apologist to discredit him literally are repeat soviet propaganda lines. In fact Putin recently made all of these arguments again to justify his invasion of Ukraine - I trust you see the irony.
War is hell - and atomic war is hell. War isn’t justifiable, and yet war is part of human nature. This is something that Historians have studied since there were historians. Ignore that research at your peril. The WW2 and modern conflict historians have done just that.
Oh, Hitler believed a lot things... Bad for both, that Churchill was prime minister, right?
Also, I didn't say Stalin's War is Nazi apologist BS, just that it seems borderline to some BS that was spread right after the war. Which makes sense, since it was the early days of the Cold War.
Churchil was never in favor of a seperate peace, nor someone else in the Allied camp. Every declaration made that extremely clear. Claiming otherwise is delusional.
It takes heaps of irrefutable facts and very strong moral national character (for the lack of better words) to admit fucking up big time, apologizing for it and making yourself a better version thanx to such experience.
I'd claim in modern history, on large enough scale only Germany went properly through this, and is still source of a lot of guilt in their population. Allied fire bombings of whole cities, turks doing Armenian genocide, Japanese atrocities in China, russians with whatever they did anywhere in past 50 years etc... I see rather ignorance and lies and desperate attempts to look the other way rather than anything else.
I just left Berlin this afternoon after spending a week here. I knew this aspect would be present, but I was surprised how present it is. My impression is the culture here prides itself on being extremely socially and ecologically progressive as a way of atonement.
Grafitti/street art seems to be encouraged as an emotional and creative outlet. Plenty of world class free museums, and most others are rather cheap (8-10 euros) compared to other locations in Europe.
Berlin is special. Germany as a whole is much more conservative.
"Never again" is still a big part of the culture. The rise of the Nazis is a common theme at school, not only in history lessons, but also others ("analyze this speech's rhetoric").
I suppose as a German it feels natural to be able to criticize what the people in your country have done before yourself and some patterns are fairly easy to spot. It's sometimes hard to understand why it can be so difficult for others.
It’s very worrying that in the US criticism of the government is now being actively censored and suppressed.
Is it true that US whistleblowers should consider getting to Berlin before leaking their information as German laws on speech would help protect them? For example wouldn’t Assange and Snowden have been much better off if they had?
Hate speech isn't protected, in case you mean that.
Governemt criticism and whistleblowing is generally regarded more highly. As far as I can tell Snowden is well respected and the idea of granting him asylum is fairly popular (it almost happened, but the US's pressure is strong).
The laws in place aren't as good as you'd hope, though. The powers that be are, for some reason, not very happy with the idea of it becoming easier to expose their misbehavior, so protections for whistleblowers are not all that great. There was a recent attempt to pass a law that improves these protections, but it got watered down quite far.
Being in Germany wouldn’t have saved them, and it’s fantasy to think they would have. They’d have to have been in Venezuela, Iran, NK, China, or as worked for Snowden, Russia.
Anti-whistleblower/leaker sentiment has always been a strong force in every gov’t - only being physically in the jurisdiction of the ‘enemy’ is decent protection, and even then assassinations happen.
And yet... fascism is on the rise again all over Europe. Amazing really, when you think of it, it's 100% known what it leads to and yet there are people that refuse to learn these lessons.
Yeah, it's amazing what people will buy when they feel their circumstances are poor. I feel like Berlin putting it very in front of your face means the youth will never forget or misinterpret what happened.
My partner on this trip is a Brazilian (from Sao Paolo) who has been living in Paris for the past decade. She touched on the fairly complex history of that country and how someone like Bolsonaro could be popular. The country is large with very different regions, each with their own capital, etc, which leads to a sort of isolation in ways. Yet their supreme court was still able to see fit to punish claims of election fraud that the US is incapable of doing.
I am affraid it is worse: those people actually want all those things, the bad effects are not part of the risks coming with fascism, they are part of the promise. Sad indeed...
No it is not funny at all. Terrible things were done in world war 2. I don't see any humor in that. It would be great to think that the world has seen the end of totalitarian regimes determined to expand at any cost, but world politics suggests otherwise.
You are sticking to the term "militarily crippled" but is it justified? Yes, Japan had lost the war by that point. But crippled implies that they could not fight back, or inflict losses on an invading force. There is no evidence to suggest that.
If the two bombs had not been used, when would the war have ended and how many lives would it have cost on both sides before it was over? More or less than 200 000? Would that have been better or worse morally?
Those are difficult questions. I don't claim to have good answers to them, but I would not glibly dismiss them with sarcasm.
> Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
> McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.
The firebombings were really, really terrible. No question. They would have continued to near total obliteration of the country if it hadn’t been for the nukes forcing the surrender, that much was quite clear.
Your evidence is a movie whose raison d'etre is to elucidate the viewpoints of an American citizen and military leader who is heavily implicated in this decision and in other American war crimes, and even that document does not support your point (McNamara openly admits that US bombing of Japanese population centers was a war crime.)
I'm not sure I would class that as 'heavily under dispute'.
It's not clear what point you are trying to respond to. I am aware that McNamara discusses the firebombing of Japanese cities cities as a warcrime. The main point of the movie is asking the question if nuking two cities was a lesser evil than continuing to try to force Japan into submission by continuing the campaign. The movie is not presented as evidence of anything: it was presented explicitly to provide the alternative viewpoint to the post I replied to.
Certainly the death toll would have been higher without the two bombs. By what measure would you claim that there is no dispute that Japan was "militarily crippled"? There is difference between losing a war and being unable to mount a punishing defense.
If you are a GI waiting in a tropical hell-hole (their words, not mine) for an invasion, the nuclear bomb did in fact seem like divine intercession.
(Japan was not militarily crippled, they actually had far more forces then the United States anticipated in the home islands. Japan was also pretty much completely disconnected from Germany even before Germany fell)
I really don't understand this American attitude where everything someone does always has to be a revelation like never seen before. Oppenheimer was clearly an extremely capable physicist, and to portray him as "no Einstein" is just lazy, dishonest, and plainly ignorant.
There was a similar thread were people were talking about Alan Turings running times, and concluding that they are worthless compared to modern-day Olympic athletes. I mean, if that's really the thing you want to point out about Alan Turing, to me that just demonstrates that you have some issues.
Yeah I don't think it's fair to compare him that way. Einstein on the other hand benefited a lot from the timing of when he was born and started working in physics. His work was very much built upon that of others... Maxwell discovered the relationship between electromagnetism and light, Michelson inadvertently proved 'c' was a constant, Lorentz described the transformations between frames of reference and effects like time dilation and length contraction. It sounded like Lorentz was on the verge of special relativity but just couldn't accept the universe being that weird. I think what it took was not a super-genius, but someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion.
I haven't met anyone that has read Einstein's papers and things of him as something but a super genius.
Obviously his work is based on the result of others, you could make that claim for 100% of scientists and mathematicians.
Not only was relativity a mind blowing thing that he clearly saw through, there's the massive leap to general relativity, then there's the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the mass energy equivalence, Bose-Einstein condensate, the cosmological constant and even his work on quantum entanglement. Any of which would make a physicist very famous. For one single person to come up with so many ideas, is almost unbelievable.
I think both are true. Timing plays a role but it requires the local (in a temporal sense) genius of the day to put together the pieces.
Plenty of other physicists were contemporaries of Einstein and did not see what he saw.
I suspect also that had Einstein instead lived in this modern age where, at least to this layman physics progress appears to be floundering, he too would have been struggling to stitch all the pieces together into some semblance of a whole.
I sometimes wonder what it would look like if a time traveller became stranded in the past and needed to advance physics by several decades in order to build a device to return home.
And even when Einstein didn't know the answer, in things like the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky it shows he was also really good at coming up with the right question.
Special Relativity wasn't really all that special - Einstein put all the existing pieces together. Lorentz actually put it together but just didn't believe that's how the universe actually operated.
Einstein's genius was the General Theory of Relativity. That was truly original and revolutionary thought, the likes of which we only see every few hundred years.
And let's not forget that he released four monumental papers THE SAME YEAR( called Annus Mirabilis, miraculous year)! Brownian motion, Special Relativity, Photoelectric Effect and Mass-Energy Equivalence.
Thanks to the timing, I strongly suspect that half of those four — in aggregate, not necessarily two of the four complete items — were from his wife, who was also brilliant.
You can take kahnclusions' word for it, or you can take Eugene Wigner's:
> I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
Neumann was a human calculator + encyclopedia in one. If there was ever intellectual olympics track and field, he would dominate the single sprint event.
What Einstein had was a deep curiosity, damn near super-human persistence, and some measure of an inventor's creativity. Even in mundane interactions, his curiosity stood out.
Yea, and Hilbert was just operating mathematically once he new the setup, as far as I understand. Einstein's special sauce with general relativity was the whole curved space-time thing. I mean, very few even really valued the theory once he released it until decades later. A century later, it's effectively unchanged, with a lot of extensions of course. It is probably the achievement in physics.
I would argue that the biggest achievement in physics ever was sir Isaac newton: not only the 3 laws formulating classical mechanics, but also inventing calculus itself - which nowadays is basically all what these scientists use all day now (massively complex differential equations) + statistics
> which nowadays is basically all what these scientists use all day now
Newton was a genius, but calculus isn't solely his. A lot of modern calculus is closer to Leibnitz's formulation rather than Newton's, e.g. notation [0].
My understanding has grown to be that Newton's genius was probably the incredible intersection of Calculus and Physics. (One or the other might have occurred to others, but Newton synthesized them better and faster and at the same time.) Newton's Calculus was rougher and aesthetically uglier, but he did the most the quickest with "Applied" Calculus. Leibniz had the raw math of the Calculus better and aesthetically his notation was much better. It was less "Applied" and didn't quite capture as much of the relationship to Physics (but it captured relationships to other parts of math that Newton missed, being so focused on Physics first).
We use Newton's insights into the applications of the Calculus to other sciences and we use Leibniz's artful way of capturing the Calculus to symbols on paper (and chalkboards).
There's a power of "dualism" in mathematics that sometimes you don't know that you have the right math until you've got two (or more views of it), enough to say "these lenses really do show the same thing".
I find it interesting to spot such dualisms, and especially how many of them were contemporary mathematicians working at some remove or another (countries or an ocean apart). From a computing perspective that's always been fascinating to me about the Church-Turing Theorem (which is always a relevant tangent on HN). Most people ignore Alonso Church's contributions and just call it the Turing Theorem, but the Theorem itself is about dualism (that all formulations we found of computation themselves are dual and can be translated or emulated between each other) and doesn't exist if it weren't for Church and Turing coexisting and conversing. (Plus, it has been said that it was Church that originally proposed the math to prove the dualism between their work and it was a sequence of correspondence that Church originated.)
That is no disrespect to Alan Turing, of course, to include Church in that theorem name and respect the dualism of their contemporaneous work. I think that balance looks a lot like Newton versus Leibniz: Turing knew the practical applications of computing and was starting from a place of having built them (though classified at the time) and Church was working from pure principles and theory in mathematics (the Lambda Calculus). We greatly benefit from both having worked on the same ideas as duals of each other, and we greatly benefit that their correspondence involved an ocean in between them so that they also weren't entirely in the same mindspace. We use a lot of Turing's applied practical synthesis of computing and we rely on a lot of things from Church's notations or things derived from it (including the Y Combinator for which this site's domain name refers).
Modern computing owes a lot to the dualism of Turing and Church. Modern Calculus owes a lot to the dualism of Newton and Leibniz. I find that incredibly interesting and I appreciate that about the mathematics of both things.
I think it's fair to say that Newton was a genius but also that a lot of the stuff during that time was ripe for the picking. There were several contributors to the developments of calculus.
And Newton's calculus was pretty quickly "re-factored" from geometric to analytic terms.
That's kind of like claiming that SpaceX isn't that special because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked).
It seems to me that people forget that the "picking" part is what it's all about: actually doing the work.
SpaceX isn't that special. It's 70+ years of NASA work and the inevitable improvements found in 2023 tech compared to the last time NASA was actually given budgets for this.
Making reusable boosters work was pretty special. No incumbent was going to attempt it because they were unwilling to reduce their per launch profit margin on an unproven risk. SpaceX changed the entire economics of launch services and obsoleted every other player with their plan that detractors were sure would never work.
I didn't say Newton's work wasn't special. The implication is that general relativity is special-er.
> because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked).
Yea, that kind of is the point. General relativity came out of nowhere and was executed on at the same time. SpaceX is irrelevant to discussing achievements in physics.
What you are saying applies practically to any person, scientist, professional, artisan or whatever. You and me are writing this on HN because someone invented integrated circuits, before the transistor, before and before and after and after (e.g. Internet). It is the basics for the old adagio [1].
> someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion.
It's been pointed out to me a few times that a lot of big advances in the natural sciences are made by people early in their careers who aren't very old. Perhaps it's easier to accept something "weird" and follow such a thought when you're not two-three decades invested in an old paradigm.
Einstein did 3 separate and mind bending discoveries each worth a noble-price (and published them in the same year).
More importantly Einstein's peers thought he was above them all.
Quoting Eugene Wigner who know both Einstein and Von Neumann.
"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi (John) von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."
Exactly, everyone builds on the past.
Criticizing Oppenheimer in this way is missing point.
Maybe he wasn't Einstein, but maybe Einstein wouldn't be able to organize and run a project. Part of this was also a combination of Physics Knowledge merged with getting things done, managing, organizing.
>I think what it took was not a super-genius, but someone smart who was willing to embrace the weirdness and take these ideas together to their logical conclusion.
Not necessarily. Einstein himself said that his greatest advantage over others mathematical physicists was that he was willing to stay with a problem longer.
I'm not disagreeing that he was a genius, only that genius is a very ill-defined term.
This debate has popped up in France since Henri Poincaré was also working on these topics.. what I got out of it is that Einstein was the only one who could integrate all the bits into a coherent physical model, regardless of the genius of the other scientists involved.
I think he’s fascinating and capable. I read American Prometheus a few years ago, which is the biography of him that’s really in depth and factually accurate. One note I thought was interesting was that Einstein was considered from a different generation of physicists and people looked at him differently.
But the book compares Oppy’s contemporaries like Hans Beta to Oppy and reaches the same “no Einstein” conclusion. But my read was that that wasn’t a bad thing, Oppy was extremely capable in physics, but his real natural talent was in bringing out the true insights from others rather than making those insights himself directly, and was otherworldly good at coordination leadership. Which is why he led the Los Alamos project.
I don’t think I view “no Einstein” as a dig, but rather a factual truth presented in the best biography of the man and meant to highlight his world beating talent.
Being a scientific administrator (which was Oppenheimer's primary job in the Manhattan Project) is a different job than primarily being a researcher, and Oppenheimer was quite good at it which is all the more impressive given that this was his first administrative role.
This is kind of like those software engineers who end up great technical managers and eventually directors or above. There is a very valuable skill involved that is not necessarily the same skill that makes a good IC.
“No Einstein” is often used as a put-down so it sounds insulting, but here I think it’s literally comparing his achievements to Einstein? Coming off second-best in that contest isn’t as much of a dishonor as it sounds.
I took high school AP physics without the prerequisites, and managed to do well in it. An underclassman took it after I graduated, and apparently the teacher would goad him on by saying that exactly, but compared to me rather than Einstein. Years later on the other side of the country, I was walking down the hallway at the rocket factory I worked at. I saw that guy sitting alone in a conference room, and he was interviewing for a job! On sight, he shook his fist and cursed my name, declaring me his nemesis! I took him out to lunch, but made him pick up the check...
It's not American attitude, it's just people being people.
As a reminder, even Einstein was dismissed as an incompetent quack by his colleagues in Germany when he unveiled relativity, so lack of respect for one another has always been a thing for our species.
This implies new ideas have to be revolutionary ? It's usually possible to progress in the existing direction. Science advances one funeral at a time and all that jazz.
With such a heuristic, if you seek food, and most of your environment is not food, so you dismiss your entire environment as not food, and refuse to seek, you die :)
Ironically they portray Einstein as sort of out of touch with contemporary quantum physics in the movie and explain that as the reason he wasn't part of the Manhattan a project.
The interviewed article doesn't imply that he wasn't a good physicist, it says that his contributions aren't comparable to the kind of geniuses like Einstein or Johnny Von Neumann.
It also explains few of the reasons: lack of focus, timing, different scientific culture.
I'm not exactly understanding why so many people are taking the offense either.
The interviewer asks a very straight forward question multiple times: help the reader how does Oppenheimer ranks in his skills and contributions to other physicists of that era and it does just that.
No one is Mozart. All we can control is our disposition and the work ethic of Amadeus' Salieri is worth striving for.
However the notion that Oppenheimer and Salieri were mediocrities because they weren't the best is a bit insulting. If those highly capable and powerful figures in history aren't worth dignity then what about the 99.9% of people that are below their level? Everyone deserves dignity.
I don't know about taking offence but there's something grating about the
tendency to try and "rank" everything (either explicitly or implicitly) - which underpins so much internet content. Such discussions always feel like those "who would win in a fight" conversations you may have had as a kid.
This is not to say everyone is equal let's all sing kumbaya but if we're discussing classical composers do we really need to rank someone vs Mozart/Bach/Beethoven? It rarely adds anything.
I understand that too, but you also need to understand that the public for such articles are the people that wonder exactly how does Oppenheimer ranks among the scientists of his era.
There are (in that era) no other geniuses 'like' Einstein or von Neumann.
Einstein was probably the most visionary scientist of the whole century at making huge steps forward in several key areas. John von Neumann made landmark achievements across pure maths, physics, engineering, computer science and economics.
To say that a basketball player is not comparable to Larry Bird or to Michael Jordan is no disparagement.
Larry Bird is probably the real Einstein equivalent because he was great as a college player, NBA player, head coach, and team executive. Oppenheimer may not have been the genius of Einstein or von Neumann, but there's no telling that either of those guys would have had the ability to drive the kind of program management results that Oppenheimer did, right? Competence and capability span domains, it's not always productive to isolate one's capability within a single "vertical" of achievement.
Running times? Are they confusing Turing with Roger Bannister, the guy who first broke the four minute mile? Track surfaces, shoes, nutrition and training methods were quite different then. Someone gave a Ted Talk in which they factored out all the technological advantages that modern sprinters have over Jesse Owens, and Owens comes in at 0.1 seconds beyond Usain Bolt in one of Bolt's Olympic 100 meter races. Which means that there great athletes in the past who would be very competitive today. Wilt Chamberlain in basketball being another example.
> Are they confusing Turing with Roger Bannister, the guy who first broke the four minute mile?
I don't think they are. Turing was a runner. He ran in the 2:40s for the marathon, which is a reasonably good amateur time even today, and was a few places away from making the British Olympic team.
(It's also ironic that you (understandably) refer to Bannister by his mile - he himself would rather have been remembered for his achievements in neurology.)
You probably have not come across Lev Landau's ranking of physicists.From Wikipedia:
Landau kept a list of names of physicists which he ranked on a logarithmic scale of productivity ranging from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, 0, was assigned to Isaac Newton. Albert Einstein was ranked 0.5. A rank of 1 was awarded to the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Satyendra Nath Bose, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, and others, while members of rank of 5 were deemed "pathologists". Landau ranked himself as a 2.5 but later promoted to a 2.
I think almost more offensively, is the concession that he did Nobel-level work but was ‘No Einstein.’ We are talking about the smallest fraction of individuals who are capable of insight in physics at that level, and I can’t help but think that it’s only chance that separates them.
I don't understand your complaint. Oppenheimer was a good physicist but nothing spectacular. The idea he did novel worthy stuff (whatever that means anyway) is not much shared by professional physicists, whatever their politics.
It’s tabloid gotcha/clickbait techniques metastasizing into everything.
People have innate ability but achieve different outcomes based on where when and how they come of age. The problem with these trains of thought is he wasn’t born in 1980 or 1580. At that time, Einstein was the guy who was able to figure out how to connect a bunch of dots and communicate those ideas and concepts to the world.
Oppenheimer may or may not have had the physics genius of Einstein - but he was certainly able to build a massive project team, execute on his project and release a new force. I’d venture to guess Einstein wouldn’t be suited to that work.
It isn't so much about competitiveness or pettiness, but rather about individualism. Americans for some reason always like to think that everything was invented by a single super-genious individual working alone in a cave with a box of scraps. That's how it's always presented in the media - superheroes (alone or in a very small group), lone scientists, billionaires who single-handedly created their wealth from scratch, etc.
In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden locks himself for year in a small laboratory, comes up alone with a new formula for super strong steel and, because it is the best steel, Rearden becomes a very successful entrepreneur.
This makes absolutely no sense but for some reasons I don’t explain, this is now seen as how science and business should work in the eyes of people calling themselves "realists".
Why does that make no sense? Sounds a lot like how Google and Facebook were both born along with many other businesses. Rearden is never said to run the whole business himself after all, just do the experiments to develop the new tech.
Which is another weird thing. US declared the space race "won" when they got to the moon, despite being behind in all other milestones like sattelite and manned space flight.
If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...
No, the battle was an economic one, never a science one. Let’s face it: both the US and Soviet Union had extremely capable scientists.
But the entire Cold War was about which economic system was the “best” and in the end, the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money and could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash.
>>could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash.
Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.
The Brian shuttle orbited the Earth twice in 206 minutes of flight, travelling 83,707 kilometres (52,013 mi) in 3 hours and 25 minutes (0.14 flight days). On its return, it performed an automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Buran never went through an equivalent of the shuttle approach and landing tests because the An-225 wasn't ready. It was never certain it would fly back successfully on reentry.
When is anything ever certain? The first shuttle flights flew with only two people who had ejection seats, clearly NASA wasn't certain of success.
I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project.
> Running out of money is how you lose this battle.
True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending.
You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all.
By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one.
They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.
The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3]
$68 billion is a lot, but it also only three Big Digs ($22 billion). If Chernobyl killed the Soviet economy it was because it was in already terrible shape.
Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well.
And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war.
If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
> Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well.
The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine.
Honestly, it would have had them either way. You can't change the shitshow that was Imperial Russia that easily, and tsarist legacy was hamstringing any reform (for example in the decision to continue the systems of secret police and prison camps - neither was Communist invention)
However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms.
Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
A lot of people forget that the reason there even was an uprising was because the country was so poor and the upper class was seen as decadent and out of touch.
Honestly they also seemed to have gotten really unlucky with their last tsar. Makes you wonder how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
> how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
That certainly sounds like bs. The pre-soviet famines' causes were directly the repressive, backward, exploitative and simply evil system that existed and forced the peasants to starve so the nobility and select bourgeois upper class members co-opted into the system could live lives of decadence.
Everything is man made when it’s “them” (communists). And just part of society and natural when things happen in America’s capitalism. The US doesn’t even have universal health care. I don’t know the exact death figures, but it’s not pretty. All deaths that could be prevented from some basic collectivist attitude. Instead of forced individualism.
the US and a lot of the capitalist world had the Great Depression and more. Are those “natural”? The country is forcing a recession now and causing poorer people to get squeezed dry.
Season 2 captured so much of my 1980s kid "this is the space future I was promised". At the time my uncle even worked on projects at Nasa and would describe some of the ideals of the space shuttle program in a way that For All Mankind Season 2 captured that boring reality never quite did, especially after the Challenger disaster.
(Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)
What got people to the moon was working together instead of against one another, trusting science instead of beliefs, and valueing knowledge over money.
Oh, and remind me: Who was in charge of the Saturn rocket project again?
I still find it very odd when someone takes an abnormal amount of pride in the accomplishments of other people that they just happen to share a geographic proximity with.
Did you go to the moon? Were you involved in anyway with the advancement of rocketry, the mercury missions, the Apollo missions, etc?
The internet wouldn't be what it is as a government project. Millions of person-hours invested by mostly private companies to make networks and lay cables and create software (which is also constantly out-competed by other software).
A government can't do that, and wouldn't try. The internet is overwhelmingly a result of private indivuals and companies doing work.
Ironically of course, the internet's origins were a US government project. So even then, you're not making tons of sense in the context of this thread.
You're right, of course the market did have something to do with the internet exploding into what we know and love/hate today. It's also true that ARPA/DARPA (depending on when you'd have asked) was responsible for its invention. That is a US government institution, however this thread places the origin of the internet in the context of American competition, so in my opinion it does make sense to deny that the internet came from that.
I do disagree that a government couldn't or wouldn't do that; the internet is infrastructure and governments do that kind of thing all the time.
America has some of the most beautiful natural landscapes on the planet due to its diverse environments.
Generally, there is no country that has as favorable as a future outlook as the US due to its robust demographics, dynamic economy, and wealth of natural resources.
Really? Every major technological (and cultural) advance since the steam engine has been from the US. Atomic bomb, Hollywood, internet, social media, AI, (wokeness?).
Granted, just like on an individual level, success != happiness, Americans are extremely unhappy and messed up IMO on average. But in terms of performance, they are friggin amazing, and have changed the world multiple times for the better.
I mean, it's obvious that this is what you're being told in the US. But trust me, they tell people in the UK or in France the exact same thing. They cherry pick different examples though, but the story is the same. US/English/French-exceptionalism.
Not in Belgium though. I figure that in Belgium it would be too obviously false.
Ah, but don't forget the Saxophone was a Belgian invention! Well the inventor was born in the Netherlands, but Belgium didn't exist then, and that territory is now in modern Belgium. And he did invent it after he permanently relocated to Paris. But still, through and through a Belgian invention!
You can have the sax, we'll take superconductivity, the microscope, the telescope, realism in painting, the Mercator projection, concurrent programming, and the capacitor ;)
I couldn’t believe the narrative of WW2 I “learned” when I visited the War Museum in New Orleans. It’s really quite remarkable how countries can simultaneously tell the truth while having widely differing narratives.
Reminds me an Hezbollah war museum in Lebanon. What a surprising history class, keeps me curious of what I ear
/read that is produce in “my” western country.
I've been there a couple of times. I wouldn't say it's outright incorrect, but everything is very US-centric.
The place is also massive, you do get a sort of mental fatigue going through, reading, and processing all of the stuff. We were there from opening at 9 and I think we left some time around 2 or 3. And while we made it through all of the building and exhibits, we were definitely spending less time on any one thing towards the end. So if there were any real errors, if they came towards the end of the day, I'd have likely just not been paying any real attention by that time.
There are little NFC cards you get that you can scan on various stations to hear about the person your card represents. There are various soldiers, leaders, and Bob Hope (not kidding, you get to hear all about his USO tours).
But you hear about everything through the lens of its relationship to America.
To expand on this US-centricism (and to address the glib reply you got)... if this was your primary source of information for WWII you'd easily come away with the impression the US were the only country fighting the Axis. There's a few exhibits that present the number of US troops/vehicles/ships/etc vs the Axis to try and emphasis the scale of the challenge ahead of them. The contribution of most of the other Allied nations, and the fact they were fighting for years before the US fully entered, is so diminished that it seems irrelevant.
When I think of American inventions, my mind goes to the airplane, the transistor, the telephone, and more recently, GPS.
When I think of French inventions, the stethoscope, braille, and pasteurization are immediately obvious. Hot air balloons too I believe.
I donno, it doesn't seem like much of a competition to me. Hell, I'm a Canadian - we've got the snowmobile and insulin, to reference, not a whole lot else. I don't think it's unreasonable for one to observe that some countries have been more inventive than others.
The French would claim the enlightenment, the republic, Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre. Basically how societies around the world are organized and the modern way of giving meaning to life.
You might say those are a different categorie of things, and they would say it is a more important category of things and it therefore demonstrates French exceptionalism. Countries tend to demonstrate their exceptionalism on metrics they are good at.
(btw, the French list of inventions is actually quite long too. Bicycles, cars, airplanes, submarines. In fact, many of the things Americans and English also claim to have invented. Like Americans have the atom bomb, the French have radioactivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_inventions_an... )
Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany.
> Hollywood
Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world.
> internet
Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland.
Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.
The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia.
The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts.
In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time.
Limelight spawned offshoot production efforts from former employees using end of life Limehouse equipment, eg: the 1906 feature length classic The Story of the Kelly Gang
The original cut of this silent film ran for more than an hour with a reel length of about 1,200 metres (4,000 ft), making it the longest narrative film yet seen in the world.
The first proper 'Hollywood' feature length was the 1915 KKK film The Birth of a Nation.
If film was invented in France, why didn't France become the film hub of the world, then, instead of Los Angeles? If packet switching is from the UK, why didn't the UK build a world wide network instead of DARPA? If HTML was invented by a Brit in Switzerland, why didn't the UK or Switzerland become a hub for the world wide web instead of silicon valley?
You say that the rocket sent to the moon was built by a German, as if that's points against the United States. To many Americans that isn't a bad thing. It is a foundational American value to adopt culture, skill, and ambition from abroad.
> If film was invented in France, why didn't France become the film hub of the world, then, instead of Los Angeles?
The US wasn't disrupted by WWII nearly as much as France. The US also has a larger domestic monolingual market, so there's more potential for network effects.
By the way, this is true even today. The EU is a larger unified market than the US, but linguistic divisions are still a significant barrier.
This viewpoint is funny given the full on American individualism thing. "one superhero invented the Atomic bomb. And he was American!"
When pointed out that it wasn't one American but many imported people from around the world then suddenly things shift to "well of course, that's because only the US allows lots of individuals from around the world to work together as a team to do great things".
The American point of view is that anyone who adopts America as their home is American. I don’t care what a piece of paper says. You move here and make your home here, you’re one of us.
The American point of view is that people are American when it allows Americans to keep to their narrow minded patriotism and aren’t when it doesn’t suit it.
Yes every state shares this view. They may not assume you’re American upon meeting you but if you tell someone you are, they will almost certainly accept it.
It's not really incongruous because Americans don't really have an origin besides the original natives. What makes us great is our immigrants. We're all immigrants.
What original natives? You mean the Asians that migrated down to what's now Canada and the US?
In the end it's a definition of how far back you want to look to define "original natives". And the further back you go the more inexact are the "facts". Do we all come from this one place in Africa in the end? Are we 100% Homo sapiens Or How much Neanderthal is in us? Does it depend on which migration wave our ancestors were part of?
Meaning by extension of your logic if I choose the right cutoff Europe is African actually so the Atomic bomb was invented by an African!
Personally I think that the cutoff should be somewhere around second or third generation immigrants. Specifics can depend on how much integration with existing local culture happens or how much individual silo groups cling to their country of origin. And then there's of course the "eradication of previous inhabitants" that sometimes happened. The majority population of the US has roots in Europe, yes. But US culture" is definitely distinct enough now to stand on its own.
First and second generation immigrants make up ~25% of the American population (roughly even split). Drawing the line such that a quarter of Americans aren't American doesn't seem right to me.
That's a fair enough way to think about this from some angle. Specifically I guess the citizenship one which clearly makes people Americans way earlier than my scenario.
It's not as easy as that though on a more philosophical level and from various different angles. E.g. think yourself back to the days those Asian tribes presumably came to America. I read it was three waves. Was the first wave the only true "native Americans" then and the second wave was an immigrant already? That became "native" when and how then? (never mind that there was no such thing as citizenship of a country at that time)
Doesn't that reinforce the point though? Europe had all these brilliant, well educated people and didn't manage to rise above shooting each other until the civilisation on the continent was more or less reduced to rubble.
That isn't a result that makes Europe look clever. The major intellectual innovation out of that era was communism. The US approach outperformed Europe's by such a margin that it isn't worth comparing them.
Because you think the US managed to get above shooting each other? Ah, my sweet summer child. Enjoy your mostly empty continent surrounded by oceans and the quirk of history who briefly put you were you are. It’s unlikely to last long.
You don't think capitalism was a major intellectual innovation?
That came out of Europe, and well after the steam engine.
And, I think you mean "Marxism", not "communism"?
Communism in the West predates capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism lists examples like Tommaso Campanella's 1601 work "The City of the Sun" and Morelly's 1755 work "The Code of Nature" as some of the works which predate Smith's 1776 work "The Wealth of Nations".
> Every major technological (and cultural) advance since the steam engine has been from the US
[citation needed]
It's interesting to me how people who talk of advancements of our civilization in such an absolute manner are often the ones who know less about our civilization.
I would argue that synthetic bovine insulin is much more important than Hollywood or social media, but YMMV.
I would also argue that the telescope, the printing press, the telephone, the cinematograph and the world wide web together had the biggest impact on human culture since the invention of writing and agriculture, they basically boostrapped the modern society as we know it.
I would also argue that steam power is known since the ancient Egypt and that the steam engine is from the 16th century, USA wasn't even a thing back then
> Atomic bomb, Hollywood, internet, social media, AI
accidentally proving that leading nowhere worth visiting
History is more complex than what we learned in school. Many of the great advances in technology now attributed to the USA were actually transferred as part of a trade deal in return for support in WW2.
The atomic bomb is a good example, a massive endeavour (130,000 people and 2.2 Billion), and some of the initial insights came off the back of the work of the Maud committee in the UK who did some of the early running in this area.
The US is exceptional in many ways and can solve problems no other nation could, of that there is no doubt, but I would agree that the exceptionalism does extend to marketing itself as well.
Funny how everyone is pointing out all these inventions were by immigrants in the US.
And that’s the point. The US takes the best of the world and reaps the rewards of their work. And also makes those people wealthy in the process. Everyone wins except for the countries that lost those genuiuses.
And despite my pro US stance, I’m actually from Eastern Europe, and my country lost a lot of talent to the US.
The atomic bomb was built by Jewish scientists from Europe who fled from the Nazis.
Rockets were built by German scientists who were (voluntarily) picked up by the U.S.forces after WW2.
Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim is German, Khosla is from India (if I'm not mistaken).
The Google founders are children of immigrants.
ChatGPT was built by a guy with a Russian name. If Altman takes credit, that's just very American.
Most open source contributions come from Asia, Russia and Europe. Americans commercialize them, take credit and start bullying the original contributors.
I'll give you Hollywood and Bernays. Americans are great at reality distortion.
much of Hollywood was made by immigrants of various sorts, which picked up during the 30s when lots of people fled Nazi Germany and settled there and helped make the great movies of the next few decades - case in point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder
What’s also funny is that between "Internet" and "social media", there’s a huge layer called "World Wide Web".
That layer (which is now often confused with Internet itself) is an European invention. (A Brit and a Belgian, sitting in an office on the border between France and Switzerland, could not be more european than that).
The point is not to be pro-european, just to say that if you list inventions and remove the components not invented in the US, you will end with a list of inventions from the US.
I think the point is that defining authorship of intellectual products is a bit like putting authorship on words (even common ones). They are always part of a larger shared discourse. That is not to remove merit from individuals but to acknowledge that merit is not quantitative and could be stretched to fit political motives.
To be fair they did leave out highest per capita consumption and CO2 emissions, freedumb cars for everyone at the expense of public transport, efficiency and equitable urban planning, using guns as can openers and childrens toys, etc.
>freedumb cars for everyone at the expense of public transport, efficiency and equitable urban planning
While America is the poster child for car culture, Europe isn't a panacea either: lots of cities built up post-WWII are car-bound hellscapes too. Lots of other places have bowed to worshiping at the altar of the automobiles too, it's not just the US.
As for equitable urban planning, Europe is going through a huge housing crisis now too.
I have to tell you, between those three things one of them is not like the other. But I'll be enjoying Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend instead of getting into the typical nationalistic pissing contests that Americans usually start, and non-Americans can't help but get into a frenzy debating.
Even Einstein is overrated (or, at least, his reputation was inflated because he was the archetypal quirky scientist that journalists love to write about):
-most of the groupwork was laid by Poincaré
-Einstein's wife helped him a lot (and wasn't properly credited)
-Despite being a supposed genius, Einstein didn't "get" quantum mechanics.
Hard to argue that Einstein is not overrated when he is literally the archetype of 'genius scientist' for most people in the world. But in his annus mirabilis Einstein literally made world-tier steps forward in 3 huge areas of physics simultaneously. Any of these in isolation would have ensured his immortality. This is either the single most important short productive period of scientific work of anyone, ever, or holds that accolade in tie with Newton's plague year.
Of course, his later years did not live up to this stellar record - he both made mistakes and was less productive. But how could they?
Joseph Heller was challenged by a journalist in later years that "he hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22 recently". He replied "No. But who has?"
Einstein "got" Quantum Mechanics better than most physicists of his era.
Einstein was one of the pioneers in Quantum Mechanics, making foundational contributions to the understanding of the quantum nature of light (the photoelectric effect and stimulated emission). Even in his criticism of certain elements of Quantum Mechanics, he was incredibly perceptive. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox is a really difficult problem, which gets to the heart of the apparent strangeness of Quantum Mechanics.[0]
I'm currently reading through a book that pretty thoroughly eviscerates that last point as a myth. Part of the argument is that he was resistant to efforts to bring classical concepts into the new domain, thinking that something entirely new may be needed to explain reality. He also spent a lot of time (naturally) trying to square it with GR, something we're still working on today.
He kept up with the math and the experiments, but took a contrary view on the interpretation. As an interesting side note, the Copenhagen interpretation which was emerging around that time is now disfavored by the wider physics community (except as a calculation tool).
Freeman Dyson's expansive 1997 interview for "Web of Stories" has his opinions. Starts off around Episode 78 and several subsequent fragments. Dyson describes a very dogmatic man that resisted what the young people at the time were doing, who didn't even believe in his own (Oppenheimer's) landmark results in black holes, and who needed the limelight (Episode 83). Dyson even says Oppenheimer may have been better off for having had his clearance revoked (Episode 96). Despite all that, he was ready to leave the IAS if Oppenheimer had been fired as its Director (Episode 97).
>who didn't even believe in his own (Oppenheimer's) landmark results in black holes
Einstein was famously skeptical and dogmatic about a lot of his own "landmark results", i.e. "God doesn't play dice with the universe", and Feynman was a massive attention ...attractor.
He's hardly in bad company if those are the worst criticisms.
As an aside, this is a very common misinterpretation of Einstein's comments. After its discovery, there was a major disagreement about how to interpret quantum mechanics. Bohr, among others, advocated for a view that quantum mechanics was a fundamentally probabilistic phenomena with no direct causal explanation. Einstein vehemently disagreed with this, and felt that the universe was absolutely causal in nature. And the only reason that an explanation that rejected determinism/causality fit so well was due to a lack of research or knowledge.
That's the context where many of his most famous comments come from. He was not skeptical of his own results or views, but of others' interpretations. It's the same for "Spooky action at a distance." Einstein had a deeply held belief that the universe was causal and logical, which he held to his death. Incidentally, the probabilistic explanation, "The Copenhagen Interpretation", ultimately 'won.'
It's one of the best examples of why equating science with consensus is such an odd view. The greatest physicist of all time held a fringe view on the very topic that he was 'the father' of. His arguing endlessly in support of his view, contrary to the consensus, only made for better science for all. To say nothing of some of the most amazing debates in history, with Einstein and Bohr having numerous live public debates over many years, constantly aiming to one-up each other.
It interesting that Feynman describes Dirac in sentiments that aren’t far from what you’ve expressed about Einstein.
Death, as often as not, saves us from old modes of thinking. If we ever invent immortality, we are in big trouble. That won’t be the last thing we invent, but it will precede the last thing by no more than twenty years. Thirty at the outside.
> "The Copenhagen Interpretation", ultimately 'won.'
The debates are ongoing and "Copenhagen" (which really isn't a unified and coherent view anyway) is currently losing (among physicists, it will take long to take over in more established areas such as school education or media).
Won a popularity contest in the past because Bohr was very influential among his peers. But it always left enough physicists dissatisfied to motivate investigation into alternative interpretations, and Many Worlds is one of the interpretations which seems to be gaining followers.
There's a lot more in that interview. Oppenheimer would not listen to Dyson's QED seminar until Bethe intervened. Dyson's Feynman stories are also very interesting.
Gell-Mann settled scores with Feynman and several others on his own Web of Stories session.
The problem is that a lot of these guys, frankly, had quite large egos, and it's not terribly surprising that there would be some butting of heads and factionalism / cliques.
I'm not saying he's wrong - but within 30 seconds of the start of your clip Dyson also criticizes Niels Bohr, Max Born, Schrodinger, and Heisenburg in the same breath as Oppenheimer.
Parsing out exactly how much to take seriously, and how much is just the outcome of rivalry between a bunch of brilliant people with very strong beliefs, strong personalities, strong egos and the "eccentricity" that often comes with brilliance, being forced to live with each other for years - is a bit difficult.
I've seen Gell-Mann's interview too, and I don't find what he said about Feynman very surprising, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if others had similar but different complaints about him.
If this cat may look at that king, I have ambivalent feelings about Dyson. But, taken as a whole, I think he is aware of what his own hubris and what it cost him to think the way he did at the time. He is wistful about not talking with Weyl, Einstein, or other Institute Faculty - "A great opportunity lost." Dyson does speak very fondly of many. Feynman, Bethe, Peierls, Besicovich, Morette, Margulis, Max, Singer, and a raft of others. Gell-Mann just seemed angry from start to finish all but accusing Schwinger of improper behavior and ripping Feynman for "collecting anecdotes about himself". Web of Stories talked to (among others) Dyson, Bethe, Knuth, Wheeler, and Gell-Mann and the latter is an outlier in his manner.
In any case Dyson seems to like Bethe quite a bit, and Bethe seems to have rated Oppenheimer highly as a leader at Los Alamos and suggested that was the general opinion
@dralley - Can't reply to your post re: Dyson and Bethe but that is a masterpiece of understatement! From what I can tell, Bethe was esteemed without being envied. A truly rare accomplishment.
From the accounts I've read of other scientists in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had a connector style of personality that made him very well-suited to the role. For this type of job you don't want an Einstein who is prone to thinking deeply on one problem for weeks at a time. Oppenheimer seemed to be the one person who understand broadly what everyone was doing.
It seems like the answer based on this article is "pretty good." The evidence in favor of this is his paper on collapsing stars causing black holes (which the author suggests would have won him a Nobel Prize in other circumstances) and that he was the conceptual designer for the bomb itself. That's a pretty good case in my book.
Head of the program that implemented a conceptual design, yes, no question.
> he was the conceptual designer for the bomb itself.
Very questionable.
It took multiple attempts by the MAUD committee to convince both US DoD and US physicists that an atomic bomb was even possible let alone feasible (ie practical to build (just) and affordable (just)).
After ignoring several letters, including one from Einstein, it took a personal visit from the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant to campaign at the DoD and to then walk Oppenheimer through the Frisch–Peierls memorandum (students of Oliphant) and convince Oppenheimer to run the calculations on a compressed spherical ball of uranium isotopes (seperated by a process developed by Oliphant) himself.
It's a rarely taught and oft forgotten piece of nuclear history that the impetus and conceptual design for the Manhatten project originated from non US citizens outside of the USofA.
It's a rarely taught and oft forgotten piece of nuclear history that the impetus and conceptual design for the Manhatten project originated from non US citizens outside of the USofA.
Is it really forgotten? It's pretty well known that Operation Paperclip shoveled loads of foreign scientists into the USA. Hans Bethe, the Teller-Ulam design etc. all created by immigrants. The original a-bomb memorandum was all foreign.
Much of the USA's present technical superiority is due to the massive brain drain during WW2, I think most reasonably informed folks understand that the USA is largely a country of immigrants united by ideals under one banner, not a homogeneous people group.
I'd say rarely taught in the USofA - I dare say a vox pop person on the street interview might struggle to find someone that can name three countries starting with the letter U let alone name 5 Manhatten project nuclear scientists (that haven't had recent big budget movies made about them).
> It's pretty well known that Operation Paperclip shoveled loads of foreign scientists into the USA
Case in point really
* A: I mention that it's relatively unknown that during WWII before the start of the Manhatten project the MAUD committe spelled out that an atomic weapon was feasible and game planned a design.
* B: You respond that it's actually really well known that after WWII scientists flooded into the USofA from Europe (and a number from Nazi rocket and other projects).
B was primarily an appeal to refute the sentiment I felt reading your comment, which seemed to be passive-aggressively critical of the USA.
My assumption is that your frequent misspelling of "Manhattan" and usage of the term "USofA" is that you're not a US citizen. So as a US citizen, I wanted to encourage you that most of us with a decent high school education do consciously/subconsciously understand that this whole country is based on immigration, and much of our WW2 STEM advancements were achieved by the sweat and blood of immigrants and foreigners (at that time).
You're right a bit on A, but not for the reasons you state.
US education has trouble teaching about the environments/state-of-affairs/'climate' that lead to a historical event; they tend to focus on the event itself almost primarily.
So, while I might easily give you 5 'Manhattan-project' associated scientist names from my US education -- many people could -- I do have trouble recounting the specific discoveries/test/discussions/meetings/collaborations/etc that lead up to each small accomplishment that was then later poured into the Manhattan Project -- and I think that that's understandable; a public education is incomplete -- too much stuff needs to be done, and the student has a small expectation to further their own studies and complete the picture.
It's also a matter of regional public education and the biases present. Japanese education tends to minimize the scientific achievement of the Manhattan Project; American text-books tend to minimize our loss in Vietnam -- it would be entirely unsurprising to me if your local regional education system focused on the collaboration and contribution to the (very-early) not-Manhattan Project if it represents a facet of local culture that provides pride in the accomplishment.
American culture is pretty obviously proud of the Manhattan Project results, so we hear more about our personal contributions than we hear about other groups roles; it seems perfectly obvious to me -- and it seems like exactly the same scenario abroad; pride in the local accomplishments that contributed to The Bomb.
While Oppenheimer's work was an important milestone on the road towards the modern theory of black holes, it should not be forgotten that the existence of black holes had already been predicted by John Michell in November 1784, more than a century and a half before Oppenheimer.
Until the first experimental evidence for black holes, none of the continuously improving theories about them were taken seriously, because they were based on extrapolations of the known physics laws outside their known domain of validity, and in physics extrapolations may always fail.
Ranking scientific achievement is a very dodgy pursuit and physics is no exception.
There is a path dependence that makes it almost impossible to compare individuals that worked in different eras. This is hinted at by the famous "standing on shoulders of giants" quote of Newton and is further complemented by something I believe Lev Landau has expressed using the phrase "all the brides are taken" (he felt there weren't big enough problems for him to have a chance to measure against the "greats)"
There is one and only Universe, the understanding of which by humans is a single historical trajectory. There is no possibility to control for any variable and repeat the experiment.
Would the absence of the specific "Newton" individual delay the process of understanding the physical works? by how much? A few years, decades, centuries? Taking into account that ideas and possibilities tend to "float" in the environment of a particular era but also the presence of non-linear loops such as: influential scientists that get recognized early on can stall further development during their own lifetime!
Making the best of a risky task would require that we only compare apples with apples, individuals of a particular era and operating in the same information environment. So in this instance, ranking Oppenheimer against individuals of his generation only.
Having said all that, imho there is really nobody like Einstein. Ever since the 18th century most physics is in a sense "programmatic". There is a defined mental framework that people apply repeatedly to an ever growing range of accessible or relevant domains. Einstein's journey created an entire new paradigm (the fabric on which physics plays out is itself physics) and one we still have not fully understood.
The most exciting possibility is that somebody might be able to piece together that growing observational hints from cosmology and the various puzzles of black holes to take that paradigm to the next stage.
For all his obviously high intelligence and more than anything, organizational ability in partly directing the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer sort of pales in comparison to the true genius and all-around polymath who worked on the same project, and so many, many others. John Von-Neuman.
Even among many other extremely brilliant minds he was recognized for being exceptional. Some of the quotes from other scientists in the Wikipedia link below really hammer home his particularly, peculiarly unique brilliance. I've never seen Oppenheimer described this way.
Oppenheimer will forever be associated with both delivering the the nuclear weapon and with his own reflection on what he had done, whether triumph or regret. His legacy is equally sociological as it is scientific or technological.
To pick him apart and view him only through the lens of his physics research is very myopic, equivalent to picking apart whether Bill Gates was a great programmer.
In my field, we invoke the name of Oppenheimer (the Born-Oppenheimer approximation[0,1]) in many of our formulations, every paper we write or talk we give. He did this work when he was a 23 year old grad student. He seems to have led a complex life. Either ways, I don't see the point of this article. While building on the shoulder of giants, he managed to lead the Manhattan project to fruition under the most existential of deadlines. We could even argue that this opening of Pandora's box has had the most consequential direct impact on modern society.
Take this as a biased personal opinion from a professional physicists, not necessarily representative of the field as a whole: Einstein's insights were on a scale quite a bit beyond what anyone else has done since then. That level insight happens very rarely in history, comparable to Euclid being a monumental figure for millennia. Nobel prize winners are smart, but there are two or three of them a year.
Relativity is insane. Einstein literally rewrote the formula for “add two velocities together”. You know, like 20 km/s + 20 km/s, WHICH YOU WOULD THINK just turns into 40km/s, but it’s actually ever so slightly less.
It goes really deep in terms of what it affects in physics.
> In physics, analogous transformations have been introduced by Voigt (1887) related to an incompressible medium, and by Heaviside (1888), Thomson (1889), Searle (1896) and Lorentz (1892, 1895) who analyzed Maxwell's equations. They were completed by Larmor (1897, 1900) and Lorentz (1899, 1904), and brought into their modern form by Poincaré (1905) who gave the transformation the name of Lorentz.[3] Eventually, Einstein (1905) showed in his development of special relativity that the transformations follow from the principle of relativity and constant light speed alone by modifying the traditional concepts of space and time, without requiring a mechanical aether in contradistinction to Lorentz and Poincaré.[4] Minkowski (1907–1908) used them to argue that space and time are inseparably connected as spacetime.
Einstein did great work, no doubt. But his work was still a product of his time, and was 'in the air'. If it hadn't been for Einstein, other people would have made similar discoveries soon. They were already in the process, after all.
However I suspect, it would have probably taken several great scientists and a few more years.
But that’s kind of the point with Einstein. Work was going towards the aether and in the wrong direction. It was a leap rather than an incremental or logical next step to come up with relativity.
I might need to dig up college notes because I didn’t even know there were 3 kinds of aether theories…but yes, the Lorentz aether (so far) reads a lot like special relativity.
>Eventually, Einstein (1905) showed in his development of special relativity that the transformations follow from the principle of relativity
But that for me is really the point. Even if Lorentz had the math right, he didn't have the explanation, which Einstein delivered. And that's the valuable part in science. Having a model that explains the world better than previous models.
General relativity is insane and was definitely a bit ahead of its time. It took decades before we could test many of the implications.
Special relativity was being worked on by several people contemporaneously. The fact that it is called "Lorentz Contraction" should tell you that other people were working on it.
That is a great point to bring up! I do not necessarily disagree, but there are gradations, and some contemporary geniuses disagree with your assertion:
Wigner may have said it best: "Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement."
I believe Newton was much more important than Einstein in the history of Science. Essentially he laid the starting point for "Modern" Physics/Mathematics and everybody since then has been following on from there.
For me there are only three Scientists who could be called as truly "tectonic inducing" in the history of Modern Science. In order of ranking;
I would say Newton provided a similarly important discontinuous leap in our understanding of nature.
I want to be careful though. As some sibling comments mention, these discoveries of these great people were indeed "in the air" of their time. They will have happened. But it would have taken many more great scientists and more time.
For instance, I believe there are incredibly deep insights today derived from the mixture of quantum mechanics and information science. More deep insights are imminent and inevitable. But there is hardly one towering figure to do them all in one sweeping motion the way Einstein or Newton or Euclid did (to name a few easy examples).
Newton was more important I think. He basically invented physics as we know it. He didn't have the 200 years or so of work in the field that Einstein had to build on. He was effectively starting from scratch. He's the point at which the modern world starts, when humanity started to understand the world around them instead of letting themselves be subjects of superstition.
Well if it takes Newton to act as an example of "That level of insight happens very rarely in history", then the point stands. Unless that was what you were getting at?
> Algebraic logic, Binary code, Calculus, Differential equations, Mathesis universalis, Monads, Best of all possible worlds, Pre-established harmony, Identity of indiscernibles, Mathematical matrix, Mathematical function, Newton–Leibniz axiom, Leibniz's notation, Leibniz integral rule, Integral symbol, Leibniz harmonic triangle, Leibniz's test, Leibniz formula for π, Leibniz formula for determinants, Fractional derivative, Chain rule, Quotient rule, Product rule, Leibniz wheel, Leibniz's gap, Algebra of concepts, Vis viva (principle of conservation of energy), Principle of least action, Salva veritate, Stepped reckoner, Symbolic logic/Boolean algebra, Semiotics, Analysis situs, Principle of sufficient reason, Law of continuity, Transcendental law of homogeneity, Ars combinatoria (alphabet of human thought), Characteristica universalis, Calculus ratiocinator, Compossibility, Partial fraction decomposition, Protogaea, Problem of why there is anything at all, Pluralistic idealism, Metaphysical dynamism, Relationism, Apperception, A priori/a posteriori distinction, Deontic logic, Well-founded phenomenon
Both Leibniz and Newton did a lot of interesting things, with only some (but very notable!) overlap.
I believe it was Freeman Dyson describing Feynman, and I paraphrase, but some geniuses are like you and me, just much, much smarter. And some geniuses just see the world in a way we never can.
Actually saw this comment before reading but the article gives sufficient context for the comparison in my opinion.
> Well, he was no Einstein. And he’s not even up to the level of Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac, the leaders of the quantum revolution of the 1920s. One of the reasons for this was his birth date. He was born in 1904, so he was 3 years younger than Heisenberg, 4 years younger than Pauli. Those few years were enough to place him in the second wave of the quantum revolution and behind the main wave of discovery, in what [philosopher of science] Thomas Kuhn called the “mopping-up operation,” applications of the new theory.
An interesting bit of trivia is that Einstein explicitly did not get his Nobel for relativity. That was still considered too controversial at the time.
Another bit: at the time Einstein worked on Brownian motion the theory of atoms was still not entirely accepted by everyone. His worked helped settle the matter.
I would say that after a century of continuous successes, the theory of atoms was very well accepted by everyone.
The matter of the existence of the atoms has become pretty much settled in 1865, when Johann Josef Loschmidt was the first who determined the size and mass of the atoms, and then his results were well used by others, like Maxwell and Stoney (who determined the electric charge of the atoms).
Nevertheless, the improved theory due to Einstein has lead to more precise results about the atom properties.
Actually I consider that by far the most valuable theoretical advance due to Einstein is the concept of stimulated emission, besides spontaneous emission and absorption, which has lead to the development of masers, lasers, atomic clocks and many other related devices, which have become an indispensable part of modern life.
This is also one of few of his works, together with the general relativity theory that he published around the same time during WWI, where he introduced new mathematical relationships between physical quantities, instead of just giving new interpretations to relationships already found by others.
What I am saying, is that the brightest minds of a time, may be smart, but most of them are using the fundamental knowledge created and saved over many generations of brilliant thinkers.
There are smart people working at SpaceX today. But they are walking on the shoulders of giants like Aryabhata, Newton or Einstein.
... that we know of. Who knows how many people of Einstein's caliber grew up in some slums who never got the chance to develop and to prove themselves.
I’ve heard of this before. That there are geniuses tolling away in fields but because they don’t have the right resources, no one knows who they are. But Isaac Newton changed science without the Industrial Revolution. Without running water or cars or electricity or modern medicine. Cream rises to the top and natural geniuses like that would be very apparent very fast.
I know this Mexican dude. No education beyond high school. Designed an embedded controller running lisp on a Microchip PIC. He wrote the interpreter in assembly himself. He pulled that off in three weeks having never programmed anything before.
I think the author makes a fair point that Oppenheimer was not a revolutionary physicist like Einstein or Feynman, but rather a synthesizer and organizer who brought together diverse ideas and people to achieve a common goal. I wonder how much of his success was due to his charisma and leadership skills, and how much was due to his scientific vision and intuition. I also wonder how he dealt with the ethical dilemmas and moral consequences of his work on the atomic bomb. Did he ever regret his involvement or try to prevent further nuclear proliferation? How did he cope with the political pressure and scrutiny that he faced after the war?
Not sure why so many people are offended by the fact that the interviewed person says he was no Einstein. There's also quite much context added as to why his contributions were in some ways not comparable to the likes of these other scientists.
I mean, if you have a great developer who's even better as a manager because he has both the ability to manage and understand technical problems, is it an offense to say that "he wasn't John Carmack?".
If memory serves, Jeremy Bernstein had a beautiful essay that spoke to this question: "The Merely Very Good." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available online in any good format. But it's been collected in at least two volumes, including *The Best American Essays 1998."
Fascinating. The article implies Oppenheimer was chosen partially because Groves could control him due to Oppenheimer's loose association with the Communist party.
> So at the time, practically all US physicist were interested in building actual stuffs, and not working on theoritical models/math equations?
The problem with that approach is: It inevitably leads to stagnation.
If all I do is build practical stuff from what exists, I will get very big, very efficient, very impressive steam engines.
But I will never arrive at an internal combustion engine.
Because that requires exploring another path that, in the beginning, and probably for quite some time, will be less efficient compared to my best steam engines.
Sure, bashing already existing lego bricks together to see how they combine.
You didn't quote the immediately following:
[whereas European theorists were pursuing new concepts]
which explains a great deal. US physicists were focused on power and making bigger "piles" than had been made in Rutherfords Lab.
It was European (and Australian and New Zealand) physicists that thought of something new, and worked out the detailas, and developed the means of seperation.
These were the things that were vital to the creation of an atomic bomb .. along with a lot of mining and processing and further refining and isotopic seperation.
General Leslie Groves thought very highly of Oppenheimer, and if you got the stamp of approval from Groves, you were doing something right.
Oppenheimer was dragged through the mud during the red scare and his name is still tarnished because of that. It is ironic and a little sad that he was awarded the Fermi medal once his name was finally cleared because Fermi worked for him during the Manhattan Project. It probably would have been the Oppenheimer Medal if it weren’t for Senator McCarthy.
Oppenheimer beat Heisenberg (also a pretty smart guy) to the bomb and not by a little either. And thank whatever higher power is out there he did.
(I am reusing most of my comment from a different story)