Edward R. Murrow Interviews Robert Oppenheimer (1955) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Edward R. Murrow Interviews Robert Oppenheimer (1955) [video]

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91 pointsmr_tyzic14 comments

A few interesting things I noticed in the video:

• Oppenheimer mentions a young physicist named Dyson. This is Freeman Dyson[1], who is still active today[2]. Human lives are long.

• Cloud chambers had been around for decades at this point, and lots of particles make a "V" in a them.[3]

• I'm not very knowledgable when it comes to particle physics, so I don't know the meaning of the symbols on the chalkboard. Whatever it is, I bet it's wrong. The quark model wasn't ironed out for another decade.

• Oppenheimer was quite right in worrying more about nuclear war than contamination from nuclear testing. Atmospheric testing would result in increased cancer rates and birth defects. Not good, but an endurable harm. On the other hand, global nuclear war could have ended humanity or drastically limited our potential.

It would be very interesting to see the whole interview. Several times, Oppenheimer struggled to explain his ideas in layman's terms. It's likely that quite a few technical bits were edited out.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

2. http://www.wired.com/2014/03/quanta-freeman-dyson-qa/

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_particle

"I don't know the meaning of the symbols on the chalkboard. Whatever it is, I bet it's wrong."

Those symbols demonstrate empirical knowledge of the relationship between baryons, their masses, and their quantum numbers. It's not wrong in any sense, other than the underlying order wasn't yet understood.

cf The Baryon Octet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics)

> • Oppenheimer mentions a young physicist named Dyson. This is Freeman Dyson[1], who is still active today[2]. Human lives are long.

Aka the Dyson Sphere and the 'Orion' spacecraft project among many other things.

Surely Dyson is (should be!) better known for his role in establishing the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics.

BTW, here's an excellent book, for those interested in the history of this science. http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Papers-Quantum-Electrodynamic...

Worth mentioning that this was after Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance so he didn't have access to work that he himself had done on the Manhattan Project ... his brother was blacklisted, lost his academic job, did ranching, and founded the Exploratorium... Oppenheimer exudes a great deal of serenity and optimism considering the times and trials he went through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Security...

"The things we know ought to be in the public domain so people are fearful only in the measure in which fear is justified and rational."

and

"The trouble with secrecy is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and the resources of the whole community; of the whole country."

Smart guy. I sure do wish that had worked out for us.

This is terrific. His comments about Piaget and topology -- how children master topological ideas first, easily -- is particularly wonderful.

Also: Boy they are smoking a lot!

Smoking: he died from throat cancer, aged 62, and according to Wikipedia: "cigarette smokers have a lifetime increased risk for head and neck cancers that is 5- to 25-fold increased over the general population."

And, Edward R. Murrow died of lung cancer a couple days short of his 57th birthday in 1965 — this was only a few months before Oppenheimer's throat cancer diagnosis.

I browsed through the comments on YouTube for this video, thinking that surely this video would be too niche for the harrowing YouTube-stupidity to infect.

Oh boy, was I wrong. Don't do it!; you'll wish they'd have invented something even more potent a decade before the interview...

A wonderful interview though.

"It isn't the layman that's ignorant, its everybody"

https://youtu.be/lVCL3Rnr8xE?t=18m39s

The art historian mentioned by oppie is most likely Erwin Panofsky

And his son Wolfgang was a distinguished physicist & director of SLAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_K._H._Panofsky

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a 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.""

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