...the rooms of the house called Science. . . . One thing we find throughout the house--there are no locks...

[NNadir]

After 70 years, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s legacy is being rewritten

Our research has turned up a December date that is perhaps less significant, but still poignant. On December 20, 1953, just one day before he was informed his security clearance had been suspended, the BBC broadcast the last of six lectures by Oppenheimer in his series Science and the Common Understanding.

In a recording available on the BBC’s website, Oppenheimer can be heard delivering the sixth lecture, titled “The Sciences and Man’s Community.” In it he says:

Some moments during these lectures we have looked together into one of the rooms of the house called Science. . . . One thing we find throughout the house—there are no locks. There are no shut doors. Wherever we go, there are signs and usually the words of welcome. It is an open house, open to all comers.

The discoveries of science, the new rooms in this great house, have changed the way men think of things outside its walls. We have some glimmering now—the depth in time and the vastness in space of the physical world we live in. An awareness of how long our history, how immense our cosmos—touches us, even in simple earthly deliberations. . . .

What is new, what was not anticipated a half century ago, is that though to an atomic system there was a potential applicability of one or another of these ideas in any real situation, only some of these ways of description could be actual. This is because we need to take into account not merely the atomic system we are studying but the means we use in observing it, and the fitness of these experimental means for defining and measuring selected properties of the system. All such ways of observing are needed for the whole experience of the atomic world. All but one are excluded in any actual experience. . . .

Atomic theory is then in part an account of these descriptions and in part an understanding of the circumstances to which one applies or another or another. And so it is with man's life. He may be any one of a number of things, but he will not be all of them. He may be well versed. He may be a poet. He may be a creator in one, or more than one science. He will not be all kinds of man, or all kinds of scientist even. He will be lucky if he has a bit of familiarity outside that room in which he works.

Today I went to a nice lecture including a discussion of putative enzymes for catalyzing pericyclic reactions, "Diels-Alderases" which featured discussions of a number of DFT calculations, all of which, at their root, rely on the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation, and I thought I'd post this.

[erronis]

1. "...there are no locks. There are no shut doors..." - eventually all is accessible

But throughout our known history people, organizations/religions/nations have tried to keep these doors closed to the commons.

Eventually even those secrets hidden away by the powerful in the ancient times will be known to us. And the universe will be explored - as long as we can survive in some form.

[hunter]

2. Many people never even find the house...

... and some who do land on the doorstep are afraid to enter for fear of challenging their most cherished beliefs.

We are all born scientists and artists but this natural curiosity and creativity has been beaten out of too many of us, sometimes literally.

Our society is poisoned by anti-intellectualism.

[NNadir]

3. Many of us are not open to knowing how little we know.

I go to lots of events thinking I know something and walk out realizing I know next to nothing.

One of the signatures of a fool is the fool's certainty.