Janna Levin: evaluation

Transcript context

…We think there’s a lot of drama today on social media. Imagine that. Here’s a guy who predicts how actually in nature would be the formation of this most radical of object that broke even Einstein’s brain, while one of the most evil, if not the most evil humans in history, starting the first steps of a global war. What I also love about that lesson is how agnostic science is. Because he was asking these utopian questions, as were other people of the time, about the nuclear physics and stars. You might know this play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. There’s this line that he attributes to Bohr. And Bohr was the great thinker of early foundations of quantum mechanics, Danish physicist, where Bohr says to his wife, nobody’s thought of a way to kill people using quantum mechanics. Now of course, then there’s the nuclear bomb. And what I love about this was the pressure scientists were under to do something with this nuclear physics and to enter this race over a nuclear weapon. But really at the same time, 1939, really Oppenheimer’s thinking about black holes. There’s even a small line in Chris Nolan’s film. It’s very hard to catch. There’s a reference to it in the film where they’re sort of joking, “Well, I guess nobody’s going to pay attention to your paper now,” because of the Nazi advance on Poland. That’s the other remarkable thing about Oppenheimer is he’s also a central figure in the construction of the bomb.…

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