I read Michael Frayn's celebrated play "Copenhagen" some months back. It's an account of the 1941 meeting between two Nobel Laureate scientists, the Dutch physicist Niels Bohr and his now middle-aged former student, the pro-Nazi German Werner Hiesenberg. The foreground is a scientific discussion of quantum theory--in the background lurks the threat of Hitler getting hold of an atomic bomb through the work of men like Heisenberg. (The latter man taught what the race-crazed German totalitarians of the middle-20th Century once called "Jewish physics" at the university in Leipzig, Germany. I guess teaching "kosher" was okay if it could result in a super weapon. )
Accounts vary as to what was said by these two men and Bohr's wife Margrethe , but the historical result of the last great war in Europe is pretty plain: When a special cadre of British soldiers captured Heisenberg in Bavaria, they found he was only barely at the stage of a primative reactor. The Germans, according to Mr. Frayn, in an afterward to the play, "were frustrated...by not being able to seperate Uranium 235"--the isotope needed to make a weapon. For whatever reason: luck, Providence, the brain drain out of Germany and Italy, getter stockpiles of natural resources like uranium, and whole cities like Oak Ridge Tennessee set up practically overnight to make a plutonium bomb, etc., the Allies prevailed.
Over sixty years on, this threat, and the fear of small-minded but powerful men gaining control of nuclear weapons still hangs over us. Maybe this "war on terror" will succeed in detering the worst case scenario. Maybe some form of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) that kept leaders in Moscow and Washington at bay from each other will prevail with smaller states like Iran, if it does develop a bomb as many fear, and Israel. Idon't know.
There looks to be a struggle going on between the human desire of a few to dominate and the more-favored but also more diffused human desire to coexist. The Great Religions and most of the long-lasting philosophies, at their core but not always in practice by their followers, favor promoting our commonality. It is at this latter level I feel we must draw greater strength from, lest millions of people are blasted away many times over in flashes of great heat and light.
In search of some of cherished ideals that have lived on in spite of our failings as a species, I came across a website which I think is a good overview for those out there (like me) who need some brushing up or a succinct introduction to various"popularly-thrown-about- but seldom-defined" ascepts of wisdom. It features summations of Greek philosophy, world religions, modern science, et al. I've only stratched the surface of this but from what I've read (and reflected up on from in a comparitive religions classs I attended last year at my church) I've been struck by the human commonality between, say, the teachings of Judeo-Christianity most of us are familar with and the Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism or the Way of the Tao. The concepts differ, of course, but "the song remains the same".
I doubt there are any magic formulas here, but there is the reminder of what humans can do when they search out for what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."
http://www.thebigview.com/contents.html
No comments:
Post a Comment