Continuing Great Moments In The History of Science and Progress of Western Civilization
The Oceans and The Atmosphere Are On Fire
This is not Arjuna – but I’d rather use my own photo as a fake surrogate than steal one from Wiki (Location: Freer Gallery, Washington, DC)
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Heres’ the full quote:
We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
While not on the tips of the tongues of the Trump Gliterati, most so called US elites know those words to have been spoken by Robert Oppenheimer, US scientist and head of the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the atomic bomb, the goal of the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer is reported to have uttered or recalled those words after witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945, ironically named “Trinity”.
But there is a far less well known Los Alamos/Manhattan Project story that serves as a more apt metaphor for our times.
Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos scientists had developed a theory and were making calculations – what we now would call a model – that suggested that if an atomic bomb were to be detonated, it might set off a chain reaction that literally could set the ocean or the atmosphere of the earth on fire and extinguish all life on the planet.
Here is a current telling of the story:
Fears Raised During the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project scientists clearly took lighting atmospheric fire to be a serious possibility, although how they dealt with this possibility seems to be a matter of some historic contention. A 1959 interview with Pearl S. Buck with Arthur Compton, a leader of the Manhattan Project (pictured in Fig. 1 well before World War II, with fellow physicist Werner Heisenberg), tells a highly melodramatic account of these considerations. Buck starts the account with a phone call from Oppenheimer to Compton asking to meet immediately to discuss “something very disturbing—dangerously disturbing …”: [3]
Briefly, it was that the scientists under his [Oppenheimer’s] leadership had discovered the possibility of nuclear fusion (as distinguished from simple fission). In other words, the principle of the hydrogen bomb.
It was the supreme danger, tremendous and unknown, much worse than atomic explosion.
“Hydrogen nuclei,” Arthur Compton explained to me, “are unstable, and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy, as they do on the sun. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature, but might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen?
“And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen in sea water? Might not the explosion of the atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself? Nor was this all that Oppenheimer feared. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might not it, too, be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?”
“The earth would be vaporized,” I said.
“Exactly,” Compton said, and with what gravity! “It would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!” [3] – ~~~ end excerpt]
Can you imagine that?
Consider: Scientists actually feared destroying the planet and all living things on it, yet they soldiered on and continued to develop and detonate a nuclear bomb anyway!
Madness.
Like I said, this relatively little known story is a metaphor for our times.
Last month, satellite data showed that the northern hemisphere, for the first time, exceeded the 2 degree warming target that all the climate negations were based upon (recently lowered to 1.5 degrees in Paris COP) that could trigger irreversible and potentially runaway climate catastrophe – and extinguish civilization, see:
No biggie.
Just like the Los Alamos scientists, we all obliviously just soldier on on the path to destruction.
Another great moment in the history of science and the progress of western civilization.
Yes, we have become the destroyer of worlds.
[Update 3/11/16 -folks might want to read this interview]