History
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Oppenheimer. Portrait of an Enigma, Jeremy Bernstein (ISBN 978-1-56663-569-1, Ivan R. Dee)
The third Oppenheimer biography I have read. Compared to the other 2 this is a very brief one. Jeremy Bernstein is a physicist turned science writer who wrote many biographies for The New Yorker. In the introduction of the book he writes he never got around to writing a biography of Oppenheimer for The New…
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Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes (ISBN 978-0-375-71394-1, Vintage Books)
The third book in the series on atomic weapons after ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ and ‘Dark Sun’. Chronologically it also covers the period after these 2 books and covers the nuclear arms race and the negotiations between Gorbatchev and Reagan that finally lead to several treaties that finally lead to a reduction in…
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The noble lie
‘God has created three kinds of men, made respectively of gold: the rulers, silver: the soldiers, and base metals: the common man .‘― Plato
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Platonic Misogeny
‘Those of the men first created who led a life of cowardice and injustice were suitably reborn as women in the second generation, and this is why it was at this particular juncture that the gods contrived the lust for copulation.‘― Plato
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Snobbery
‘That Plato’s republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.‘― Bertrand Russell
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The Road From Los Alamos, Hans Bethe (ISBN 978-0883187074, American Institute of Physics)
I bought this book after reading the making of the atomic bomb. And then, as usual it ended up sitting on a shelf for a long time. After recently having read Dark Sun I decided it was time to get this book from Hans Bethe behind me. It was actually better than I expected and…
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A Rigid System
‘What happened in this country was that a rigid system was created, and then life was hearded into it.‘― Mikhail Gorbachev
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Apes on a Treadmill
‘It may be that we are jogging in tandem on a treadmill to nowhere.‘― Paul Warnke
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Dark Sun. The making of the hydrogen bomb, Richard Rhodes (ISBN 9780684824147, Simon & Schuster)
After having read ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ by Richard Rhodes I also had to read this book. It didn’t win the Pulitzer prize although it did make the short list for it. Compared to the award winning ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ I have to agree this book is not as excellent…
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