about Atomic Fragments

about In the Shadow of the Bomb

Spring 2001
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Chronicle for Higher Education

Select Seventy: Scholarly Books (20% off)

Friday, February 16th, 3pm

Mary Palevsky
author of Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions

in conversation with

Silvan S. Schweber
author of In the Shadow of the Bomb:
Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist

(June 2000, University of California Press, hc) $24.95

In the Shadow of the Bomb:
Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist
by Silvan S. Schweber

In the Shadow of the Bomb narrates how two charismatic, exceptionally talented physicists--J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans A. Bethe--came to terms with the nuclear weapons they helped to create. In 1945, the United States dropped the bomb, and physicists were forced to contemplate disquieting questions about their roles and responsibilities. When the Cold War followed, they were confronted with political demands for their loyalty and McCarthyism's threats to academic freedom. By examining how Bethe and Oppenheimer--two men with similar backgrounds but divergent aspirations and characters--struggled with these moral dilemmas, one of our foremost historians of physics tells the story of modern physics, the development of atomic weapons, and the Cold War.

Silvan S. Schweber is Professor of Physics and the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis and an Associate in Harvard's Department of the History of Science. He obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton in 1952, and later became a historian of science. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory and QED and the Men Who Made It (Princeton).