Bombs and Broomsticks

For New Year’s Eve, I watched Wicked with family. It was good, especially in the coziness of a family living room with loved ones and snuggly pets.  Some parts left me on the edge of my seat. The scene where the professor was hauled away was a little too believable. It’s happened before and it can happen again. Anti-intellectualism is a tool of dictators and we’ve see it crop up in the US, as shown in the historical movie Oppenheimer.

The story of Jay Robert Oppenheimer is well known to scientists my age. Many people have mused about why the movie Oppenheimer didn’t show the destruction of the bomb. Clearly a terrible weapon was created but the film is about the people and what came after in the US. 

The movie did a good job of showing the motivation of the scientists. Germany had discovered fission, the atom smashing power of the bomb. How was fission, the splitting of the atomic nucleus discovered? At the time, uranium was the heaviest naturally occurring element. German scientists at Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, and Lisa Meitner were trying to make a heavier element by knocking heavyweight uraniumwith a neutral particle—a neutron–to make it heavier. There were probing the secrets of the inside of an atom. When hit with a nucleus, the uranium didn’t get bigger. It broke into bits and released a lot of energy. (Read more here)

An aside here. Most atomic action occurs on the outside of the atom, the electron cloud. Electrons move around to create bonds and break bonds, and that’s most of what happens in a chemistry lab. It causes rust and powers our cells. But with nuclear reactions, we deal with the inside of the atom, and the inside of the atom is held together with the tremendous force. Einstein’s famous equation E equals MC squared dictates the immense force that’s holding the inside of an atom together. And all of this was being studied at the time of World War 2.

Hitler was a bad guy and a lot of the scientists in Germany were Jewish. They either fled to another country in Europe, as Lisa Meitner did, or they, emigrated to the US. They came with a lot of understanding and people were scared. I can kind of understand working on a horrible weapon. And as the movie Oppenheimer points out, scientists were not 100% sure how destructive this might be or how the US government would use it.

There was tremendous fallout from the bomb, pun intended. And. It created a lot of sickness. A lot of doubt. The movie doesn’t really cover that. It starts and ends with Oppenheimer being grilled by dim bulb senators. Why? He did everything his country asked of him and he did it well.  However, he dared to go to a couple communist meetings. His brother was for a while a communist and he’d had a communist girlfriend. Clearly, that didn’t stop him from helping his country. It didn’t stop him from stepping up and using his genius to create this deadly weapon for his country. If you watched carefully the Senators are the villains. The Conservative senators are the villains. They use science. And scientists. And then? They dismissed them. Like any narcissist would do.

I’ve written before about hate mail I’ve personally gotten as a scientist in Pella, Iowa. You can never be conservative enough for conservatives unless you 100% agree with them. You can be their friends. You can build a weapon for them, but they’ll turn on you because these are all or nothing people. As a scientist, I once felt obligated to point out inconsistencies in public policy to elected officials. And I’ve gotten some pretty mean comments and letters from more than one of them. I’ve given up thinking that they write these crazy bills and say these crazy things because their staff hasn’t informed them enough. These are all or nothing people. They don’t tolerate any opposition to their values without totally smearing the people who are questioning them.

Science, on the other hand moves forward when scientists put ego aside and admit some uncertainty and ignorance as they argue about evidence gathered according to the sanctioned best practices of the time. Moving forward needs some questioning the reigning values and building on them.

Many US scientists worked on the bomb. You know who didn’t? Lisa Meitner, the person who first recognized the fission reaction, who’d fled to England. And here’s another thing to think about: Germany wasn’t close to developing an atomic bomb. A lot of their scientists had left the country. (That’s what you get when you don’t appreciate intelligence and diversity.) They couldn’t enrich uranium. The scientists thought such a weapon would be a bad look for Germany. And Hitler was basically too dumb to appreciate the science. Naziism was anti-intellectual and experienced a brain drain.

(Kind of like Iowa is seeing.) The German scientists saw the destructive power and restrained themselves. It should be pointed out that Nazi doctors did nothing of the sort. 

Scientists are curiosity driven and they like to have a project. They are somewhat mission oriented in their research. Fundamental questions really fascinate them. Messing with the inside of an atom when the outside had been what was studied was like catnip to scientists. This is a criticism of scientists—they look at their accomplishments with rose-colored glasses. This means we as citizens need to elect thoughtful leaders, too. Leaders can make bad science decisions. Leaders influence the morality of a society.  As this article points out, it’s not the scientists who shape the ethics of a nation, it’s the leaders. History (and fiction) shows that having a mad-man for a leader will give scientists (and sorceresses) pause, or, as in Wicked, will drive away your best talent. They might even take a few of your secrets with them. And that is a ray of sunshine.

My first novel is out of print but my second novel is on sale at Kobo. Like most of my fiction, it satirizes the ethical problems scientists face as they search for romance and try to understand society.