1/7/2024 0 Comments Homescapes too hard![]() Later in life, Oppenheimer famously said that he had recalled words from the Bhagavad-Gita, a classical Hindu text, as he witnessed the sight and sound of the mushroom cloud: “ I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” – lines that originally described the Lord Krishna revealing his full power. ![]() As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more. Where people had once pictured doomsday as an act of God’s wrath or final judgment, now a world could could be gone in an instant, with no sacred significance, no story of salvation. The atomic bomb changed the meaning of the apocalypse. “ The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ‘Batter my heart’ But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him. government’s justification of the atomic bombings: that they saved lives by preventing the need for invasion. ![]() Intense interest in Oppenheimer’s life and his ambivalent feelings about the bomb have turned him into almost a myth: a “tortured genius” or “tragic intellect” people try to comprehend because the terror of the bomb itself is too disturbing.įor the rest of his life, Oppenheimer gave the U.S. In American culture, however, fascination with the man behind the bomb often seems to eclipse the horrific reality of nuclear weapons themselves – as if he were the welder’s glass allowing viewers to safely look at the explosion, even as it obscures the blinding light.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |