English Renaissance

Why American culture fixates on the tragic image of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most famous man behind the atomic bomb

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
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Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb.

Key Points: 
  • Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
  • But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him.
  • “The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

‘Batter my heart’

    • As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more.
    • But Oppenheimer pointedly used religious language when talking about the project, as if to underscore the weight of its significance.
    • The atomic bomb was first tested in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in the arid basin of southern New Mexico.
    • Mathematician John von Neumann acerbically observed, “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”

Describing the indescribable

    • On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, these cities suddenly ceased to be.
    • Robert J. Lifton, an expert on the psychology of war, violence and trauma, called the Hiroshima survivors’ experience “death in life,” an encounter with the indescribable.
    • When it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, he chooses to represent the attack without portraying it.

The bomb to end all wars?

    • After the end of the war, many of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project sought to emphasize that the atomic bomb was not just another weapon.
    • Among them, Oppenheimer carried the most authority as a result of his leadership of Los Alamos and his oratorical gifts.
    • The form it ultimately took, known as the Baruch Plan, was rejected by the Soviet Union.
    • Rather than seeing the bomb as the weapon to end all wars, the U.S. military seemed to treat it as its trump card.
    • The era of mutual assured destruction, when a nuclear attack would be certain to annihilate both superpowers, had begun.

Shakespeare's environmentalism: how his plays explore the same ecological issues we face today

Retrieved on: 
Friday, April 21, 2023
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In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long history of resource extraction and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the tin-hungry Romans.

Key Points: 
  • In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the long history of resource extraction and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the tin-hungry Romans.
  • Renaissance England was reeling from the effects of all these problems.

King and countryside

    • When King James became his patron in 1603, Shakespeare was tasked with writing plays to entertain a keen outdoorsman and hunter who was as much preoccupied with the material state of the British countryside as with matters of state.
    • No wonder, then, the Shakespearean stage encompasses a remarkable variety of landscapes and features an abundance of animal imagery to rival the royal menagerie – basically King James’s private zoo – and compensate for England’s dwindling numbers of wild game.
    • These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Enduring environmental issues

    • Shakespeare adapted the story from a writer whose father had proposed the existence of a flooded land-bridge linking Britain to the continent (now known as Doggerland.
    • While the shipwrecked king refutes claims to rule the unruly seas, the costumes donned by Shakespeare’s actors would have told a different story.
    • Hermione acts like her namesake when she exclaims she too would rather die than stain her name as an adulteress.
    • In inserting these environmental issues into his plays, Shakespeare forced his audience to reflect on the political, moral, and spiritual implications of early modern England’s growing power to transform the natural world.