Robert Oppenheimer drew upon another religious text to describe his feelings after witnessing the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Our 1945 Trinity gave humanity, not love, but the force to break, blow, burn, and me us dead. The Holy Trinity is self-giving Love…not an atomic bomb. Whatever the case, I can’t help finding it sadly ironic. Perhaps it had something to do with the Trinity being fundamental to the nature of God and E = mc 2 being fundamental to the nature of physics. I don’t know why Robert Oppenheimer chose to name the test of the atomic bomb after the Trinity described in John Donne’s poem. Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend He took the code name Trinity from a poem written by John Donne, a sixteenth century Anglican priest and poet.īatter my heart, three-person’d God, for youĪs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend Oppenheimer was, of course, a brilliant physicist, but he was also well-read in religious and philosophical texts. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, gave the test the code name Trinity. The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. That our instinctual impulse upon gaining such knowledge was to build atomic bombs says something sad about us - we are still the sons and daughters of Cain, and now we’re looking for ways to kill Abel a million at a time. As I understand it, matter is “frozen” energy which when released unleashes the power of the sun.
A generation earlier Albert Einstein had perceived something elemental about the nature of Creation: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (E = mc 2). Seventy summers ago in a New Mexico desert we crossed a dark threshold when we created the capacity for our own annihilation.
0 kommentar(er)
