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Comment by karlicoss | Hacker News Reader

Great read! The bit that I found the most curious is actually listed on Wikipedia (this was written in 1940):

> "No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years."

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>> "No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years."

> The GPS project was started by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1973 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System

>From 1942 to 1946, the [Manhattan] project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Is relativity used in building an atom bomb? Isn't it more quantum physics?

What about elliptic curve cryptography?

What about pretty much all of cryptography?

Yep, or RSA and most modern cryptography.

But not the cryptography that was in use at the time - for example Enigma is more combinatorial than number-theoretic.

Relativity, particularly the mass-energy equivalence principle of special relativity, lead to the thinking that lead to The Bomb less than five years later.

Atomic weapons were far more an outgrowth of quantum research than relativity. The mass-energy equivalence is a pretty minor part of the energy release of the atomic bomb at ~10%. Most of the energy is simple atomic binding energy; energy before and energy after.

Einstein’s politics had more to do with the bomb than his physics.

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