Tag: Manhattan Project
Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology
By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican
“Oppenheimer” Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing
Leaving the theatre after seeing “Oppenheimer,” I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But, after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much. A simple fact-heavy article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose leadership of the Manhattan Project, during the Second World War, produced the atom bomb, turns out to offer more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script does. And it
Oppenheimer’s Cry of Despair in The Atlantic
In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly
The ‘AI Apocalypse’ Is Just PR
On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and other tech and business figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates, signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Those 22 words were released following a multi-week
Why Scientists Become Spies | The New Yorker
On June 26, 2021, a forty-two-year-old naval nuclear engineer named Jonathan Toebbe set down, in a previously agreed-upon spot in Jefferson County, West Virginia, a plastic bag containing half of a peanut-butter sandwich. His wife, Diana Toebbe, a humanities teacher at a private school in Annapolis, stood nearby. Then the couple walked away through a crowded area, moving, it seemed, as if to spot anyone following them. Inside the peanut-butter sandwich, wrapped in plastic, was a blue SD card containing
How Bad Are Plastics for the Environment, Really?
This is hardly the time to talk about plastics is what I think when Dad, hovering over the waste bin at a post-funeral potluck, waves me over, his gesture discrete but emphatic. He has retrieved from the trash a crystalline plastic cup, with fluted, rigid sides. “Polystyrene,” he grins, inverting the cup to reveal its resin code (a 6 stamped inside the recycling symbol). “But not my kind.”
Dad, back in the 1960s, had manufactured a more resilient