Knowledge and Power in the Sciences

Abstract

In the fall of 1947, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who directed the United States project that made the atomic bomb, delivered the Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the course of that lecture, he said:

Despite the vision and far-seeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end in large measure for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. 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.

Physicists have known sin. Sin came to them, in Oppenheimer’s view, through power, the power that science had gained and used.