Knowledge and power in the sciences

Everett Mendelsohn

pp. 225-240

in: Edna Ullmann-Margalit (ed), The kaleidoscope of science I, Berlin, Springer, 1986

Abstract

Despite the vision and far-seeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end in large measure for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.