Excellently researched and argued; a useful adjunct to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s broader-ranging American Prometheus.
Did a vast right-wing conspiracy bring down the peace wing of the American nuclear establishment?
Working with declassified American and Soviet documents, McMillan (Russian and Eurasian Studies/Harvard; Marina and Lee, 1977) writes that in the late 1940s, atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer stood at the center of a debate about whether the U.S. should build a hydrogen bomb—and on an accelerated schedule at that. Oppenheimer adduced moral and logistical arguments against the bomb; the Atomic Energy Commission “had before it only one design for the weapon, and despite several years of research, it was not clear that it would ever work,” and Oppenheimer, like Einstein, Fermi and other physicists of the time, felt that this was a weapon not of warfare but of genocide. He was not the smartest of politicians, however; Oppenheimer, writes McMillan, was capable of “feline, almost involuntary, cruelty” toward opponents, and he made enemies all too easily. And so he did: Oppenheimer earned the wrath of higher-up Edward Teller, who, McMillan reveals, had “sat out ‘the main event’...the effort to build the A-bomb, and chosen instead to work on the hypothetical hydrogen bomb just when all hands were needed to work on a bomb that would end [WWII].” And not just Teller; a host of Air Force senior officers and anticommunist politicos found in Oppenheimer a poster boy for all that was wrong with a scientific community that would not pitch in to make the world safe from Stalin’s legions. Stalin was newly dead by the time Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, and soon the U.S., followed quickly by the USSR, was testing the H-bomb. Though inarguably aligned with leftist causes, Oppenheimer fell, McMillan writes, thanks to a conspiracy and to a newborn culture of governmental control of science, whereby “the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies”—the condition, she adds, of subsidized science today.
Excellently researched and argued; a useful adjunct to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s broader-ranging American Prometheus.Pub Date: July 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03422-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
A rare treat: cutting-edge science combined with a perceptive portrait of the people who perform it. Dressler (Astronomy/Carnegie Institution) was one of a team that set out to perform a survey of elliptical galaxies and ended by revising a fundamental axiom of modern cosmology. The ``Seven Samurai,'' as they became known on the release of their results, combined expertise in observation and theory, bringing an unusual level of astronomical talent to their task. Dressler gives brief biographies of himself and the other team members and devotes considerable space to detailing their personal interactions over the course of the project, providing an unusually candid look at not only what scientists really do, but how they feel about it and about each other. As the data from their survey accumulated, the team's initial goal of discovering clues to the absolute magnitude of distant galaxies began to fade as they realized that a large number of galaxies were traveling at unexpectedly high velocities—1,000 km per hour or more—that could only be explained by the attraction of a huge mass. Equally important, this discovery forced a reconsideration of the assumption that the velocities of distant galaxies are almost entirely due to the expansion of the universe and directly related to their distances from Earth. The implications of the discovery, and its theoretical underpinnings, take up much of the last part of the book, a generally clear overview of current thinking on the origins of the universe. A readable and engaging glimpse behind the facade of contemporary science; Dressler does for astronomy what James D. Watson's The Double Helix did for molecular biology. (31 photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs) (Library of Science and Astronomy Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-58899-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A hunt-and-peck collection of 30 pieces assembled to benefit Share Our Strength, a group dedicated to feeding the hungry. Shore (editor, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, 1992) has managed to gather a host of fine nature writers, but with mixed results. Al Gore's flimsy introduction leads with ``John Muir once wrote''—you can almost hear the snores rising off the page. But then there is Diane Ackerman's smart take on summer (``Summer''), with its bright and insightful appreciation of birds. The good and the not-so-good trade punches: Natalie Angier tries to get poetic as she recalls an urban childhood grappling with nature (``Natural Disasters''), but she is no Charles Simic, and the result is Kansas-flat and without humor. Then Edward Hoagland shines even as his eyesight dims (``Mind's Eyes''), and in his melancholy way he gathers a special sense of the land: learning to distinguish trees by the feel of their bark, finding walking ``such a puzzle as to be either exciting or tearful.'' Ted Kerasote (``Logging'') takes the adage ``An unexamined life isn't worth living'' and beats it to death; here it is logging rather than hunting (see Bloodties, 1993) he picks apart, but, Ted, an overexamined life gets darned boring. Thankfully, Karen Pryor delivers an extraordinary throng of birds (``A Gathering of Birds'') of many different feathers which gathered on a bush next to which she sat and stared at her—a bunch of birds out-humaning her, as it were. And so it goes. Half of the contributions are worth the trouble; .500 isn't a bad batting average, but it's not a great percentage when the quality of the authors is considered. Worth the price of admission all the same for the 15 crack nature essays gathered under one roof. (b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100080-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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