Expiation

SCIENCE

Scientists vigorously deny any responsibility for the war, but many of them have a bad conscience about the part that science played in making the atom bomb. Science's sense of guilt was frankly admitted last week, in Technology Review, by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, wartime head of the Los Alamos (atom bomb) Laboratory and now director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

"The experience of the war," Dr. Oppenheimer wrote " . . . has left us with a legacy of concern. . . . Nowhere is this troubled sense of responsibility more acute . . . than among those who participated in the development of atomic energy for military purposes. . . . The physics which played the decisive part in the development of the atomic bomb came straight out of our laboratories and our journals. . . . In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

Reverse the Coin. But Dr. Oppenheimer would not have the scientists--even if they could--shut down the lid of their fearful Pandora's chest now, for treasures are there as well as imps of death: "Out of [science's] work there will come . . . things which will improve man's health, ease his labor, and divert and edify him. . . . There is no need to belabor this point, nor its obverse--that out of science there will come, as there has in this last war, a host of instruments of destruction. . . ."

What Dr. Oppenheimer has great hopes for is "another side of the coin." Perhaps "there are elements in the way of life of the scientist which . . . have hope in them for bringing dignity and courage and serenity to other men."

Accept the Virtues. In the first place, he argues, science enjoys "a total lack of authoritarianism . . . accomplished by one of the most exacting of intellectual disciplines. [The scientist] learns the possibility of error very early. He learns that there are ways to correct his mistakes; he learns the futility of trying to conceal them. . . ."

Scientists also soon learn "how vast is the novelty of the world, and how much even the physical world transcends in delicacy and in balance the limits of man's prior imaginings. . . . We come to have a great caution on all assertions of totality, of finality or absoluteness. . .

"The work of science is cooperative; a scientist takes his colleagues as judges, competitors and collaborators. That does not mean, of course, that he loves his colleagues; but it gives him a way of living with them which would not be without its use in the contemporary world. . . .

"These qualities constitute a way of life which of course does not make wise men from foolish, or good men from wicked, but which has beauty and which seems singularly suited to man's estate on earth. . . .

"[Can] a comparable experience, a comparable discipline, a comparable community of interest . . . be available to mankind at large? . . . Clearly [we may] hope that there are other areas of human experience . . . to which the qualities which distinguish scientific life may be congenial and appropriate. . . ."

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