I think the most phenomenal success of the Jewish mind in my generation was the atomic bomb, which was developed almost paralelly in the USA and in the Soviet Union. In both cases, it was done by Jews but not for the Jews.
America in the late forties faced the problem of how to get a large group of Jewish geniuses in maths and physics, most of them foreign born and of rather dubious loyalty, much more intelligent and cultured than the loyal native American manpower that the Goverement had, to build a nuclear weapon for the American military. And fast. If one thinks of it, it was a very difficult management problem of creative human resources.
The Americans took them all to Los Alamos in the remotest desert. They choose as project leader an American Jewish physicist, Oppenheimer, supplied them with unlimited resources and let them work. Nominally, the project was controlled by a stolid carreer soldier (Lt Cnel Leslie Groves, pic) and the camp was guarded by soldiers. Soon the main entertainment of the creative talents was to write complicated letters that the censure couldnt understand, they invented fake Communist conspiracies, they organized "illegal" tours in the neighborhood, Richard Feynman took to break in to top secret safes just for the sport of it, in short, they found it innocent and funny to subvert military discipline - they were ungovernable. To Groves, son of a military chaplain, the behaviour of whole bunch must have been absolutely disgusting. Yet he managed the project to its successful completion, there was no sabotage and all the Jews came out in one piece and full of fame and money, and the bomb won the war.
Years after the details are coming out and there we know that there had been several Communist circles inside the camp, that they were conspiracies and rivalries, that secrets were leaked to the Russians. All was known to the military managers, yet they let them work and conspire.
The Russians managed the same problem in a different way. According to Sacharov, they built TWO science cities in the far Siberian nowhere, and they provided all the resources (while the country was suffering famine) and they put all under the civilian secret police. One of the teams was predominantly Jewish, the other one native Russian, The NKDV created an environment of secrecy, fear and terror, people was arrested at midnight and accused of sabotaging the project, and the politically dubious ones disappeared. Details from the Manhattan Project were acquired by Russian spies and were forwarded in a very controlled way. No one knew what the other team was doing. Yet the Jewish team succeeded in completing the project in only two or three years after the Americans.
But no fame nor money awaited the Russian Jews. The legend tells that when Ghengis Khan died, a thousand Mongols dammed a river to bury him in the river bed with his gold, weapons, concubines, servants and horses, and then destroyed the dam so no one will ever find the grave. Returning from the ceremony, the thousand were entrapped and slaughtered, so the secret would never be revealed. In the same way, Stalin made sure that no one of the creators of the Russian bomb would return to civilization. Once I met an old Russian immigrant, an intelligent hunchback like Mendelsohn with many medals from WWII, who lived alone in Israel. His only son had had something to do with the Russian nuclear program and would never be allowed to leave Russia.
No doubt, America is a better country for Jews that Russia.
23 comments:
My parents always maintained that Jews did better as a minority among the Goyim than they would in a society composed of nothing but Jews. In a forest ecosystem you have to have both deer and wolves - a forest with nothing but deer or nothing but wolves is not sustainable. It's hard to say what Israel would be like or whether it would have succeeded if it had been composed mostly of Ashkenazim. We'll never know because 6 million Ashkenazim never lived to make Aliyah.
The Jews must have made Groves meshugah. But he recognized that he needed their crazy brilliance or there would be no bomb. Groves not only supervised the Jews of Los Alamos but he oversaw the construction on an industrial scale of the centrifuges, etc. required for a bomb. In some ways (as the Iranians are demonstrating) this is the more difficult problem. The plutonium bomb was a very clever design involving shaped charges in a sphere timed to go off in just the right way and certainly required a Yiddische kopf to figure it out, but the uranium bomb was actually rather simple - basically an artillery gun where the uranium required for critical mass was just shot into another mass of uranium - the real trick was to produce enough U 235 of the necessary purity. The great industrial organizers (Ford) have not usually been Jewish.
The Russian method of management by fear can succeed up to a point but in the long run it is not a sustainable model. The E. Germans (in the parodic German way where you do everything to the ultimate degree) eventually had 1/2 their country spying on the other half (and vice versa), while if the W. German Chancellor sneezed the sneeze was recorded in KGB headquarters before the Chancellor could pull out his handkerchief, but who won the Cold War?
K
but who won the Cold War?
Communism, even if Russia collapsed.
Take a look at the current occupant of the White House.
European style welfare socialism perhaps. The Western Europeans decided that they were going to sit out the 3rd world war since the 1st two had almost destroyed their societies, so they left the stage of empire and diverted their military budgets (and more) to setting up cradle to grave social benefits while skipping the gulag part of socialism. Even the Hungarians preferred gulyas to gulag with their communism. American intellectuals have always been Euro and Anglo- philes so they have sought to imitate the European Utopia (certainly not the Soviet model). But at the same time we cannot lay down the mantle of Empire lest the barbarians overrun us, so now we have trillion $ deficits used to buy guns AND butter.
RP Feynmann and his idiotic stories may have done more damage to the teaching of physics in the US than any other single factor. With his bongo drums and frat boy pranks he created the impression that physics was a matter of bullshiting through the courses. His collected lectures are pretty serious affairs but he couldn't help cranking out silly books allegedly to show that physicists are human beings too.
J, you have been reading "Pandora's Keepers".
It is, I suspect, a mistake to believe the Germans would not have got there on their own, sooner or later.
Anon.
I dont know why you think Richard Feynman was not a serious physicist. He was. I am not interested in his physics, but loved the story of his Brasilian adventures. He once visited an USAID project aimed at providing running water to a favela (shanty town) on a morro (hill). The engineers were planning to build a water system and train the inhabitants to operate it. Feynman looked at the morro and noticed that it was crisscrossed by "pirate" pipes. So he commented that the people already knew what a pipe was and how to operate it. USAID was solving a technical problem when the problem must be something different.Very deep insight, and Feynman just throws it in while relating his crowning achievement of being accepted into an "escola do samba" as its official frigideira player. Frigideira is the frying pan. Also he discovered effortlessly the secret technique of bedding girls, something that Roissy is blogging megabytes about. Feynman walked through life observing things we never notice and he didnt make a big deal of them.
J.,
What was your favorite Feynman book? He was certainly a unique genius.
Also, I forget the details, but I remember reading that the Soviets set up a research city in Siberia that promoted, for a time, a spirit of free inquiry. Sort of an oasis of intellectual freedom. I think this may have been in the 1960s, but it was eventually clamped down on.
I did not mean to say that he was not a serious physicist. He is one of the greatest of American physicists. As I said before I am a dilettante in the matter of physics and his advanced papers are way over my head, but I can follow his lectures for college students. What I had the beef with was his public persona which to me conveyed the impression to those who were not geniuses like himself, that one could just screw around and get ahead in life.
What I had the beef with was his public persona which to me conveyed the impression to those who were not geniuses like himself, that one could just screw around and get ahead in life.
should read:
What I had the beef with was his public persona which conveyed the impression to those who were not geniuses like himself, that one could just screw around and get ahead in life.
I never understood his marriage. He had a maid and he married her? Anyway he was punished enough by life, dying of stomach cancer caused by radiation.
This is probably bullshit, but Feynman may not have gotten over the death of his first wife Arlene at an early age. His persona half-serious as it was may have been a mask to avoid the seven stages of grief. As usual I have no basis for saying this but a lot of people have lost faith in God after such incidents. Towards the end of his life (according to his biographer Mehra) he ribbed an earnest South Korean student for believing in God, at Feynmann's age that is usually the mark of someone who is unhappy with God about something that happened long ago.
Anyway I am off now.
I don't know how this became a discussion on Feynman but its a "just so" story to assume that Feynman got cancer as Karmic payback for his exposure to radiation in the Manhattan project. He died over 30 years after the war at the age of 70.
K
I am not sure. Radiation disease strikes long time after. An alternative hypothesis is that it was divine punishment for marrying a non-Jewish woman.
(It is a sarcasm!)
Feynman's first wife was Jewish and she died very young of tuberculosis (shortly before effective antibiotics became available). If there is a God, He loves to play little jokes on us. This tzaddik I will strike with a trolley car. That Haman I will make into the leader of his country and he will die in his bed of old age (just the other day I saw Assad and Ahmadinejad joking and laughing with each other - if there was justice in the world they would be rolling in convulsive pain). Or the other way 'round. In Yiddish they say "a mensch tracht un Got lacht." - We make plans and God laughs at them.
A freylichen Purim to you!
K
Feynman died of a rare cancer called a myxoid liposarcoma, and also developed another rare cancer called Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia.
Two rare cancers are, by definition, very unlikely to arise in the same person purely by chance.
I think it's the radiation.
I suspect he would have agreed.
Anon.
...and seventy is too young an age to die for a person of the vitality of Richard Feynman.
...and seventy is too young an age to die for a person of the vitality of Richard Feynman.
Yes. But it is questionable if he would have done anything more of any great scientific value, since most of these people achieve when they are in their 20's and 30's.
But the point is, he loved life, deserved more of it, and, as an eccentric who could not be crushed, was a beacon for anyone with an unusual turn of mind.
And as the "O-ring" episode demonstrated, he had most certainly not outlived his usefulness to society.
Anon.
Unfortunately, the Malach haMoves does not only visit those who have exhausted their vitality and usefulness to society, nor does he discriminate between the brilliant and inspirational and the dull and worthless. Many are struck down in the prime of their life - think of Gershwin. Feynman received 70 years, which is more than many get - not so long ago he would have been considered an old man at the time of his death and no one would have thought of a life of 70 years as a life cut short.
K
Could it be that 70 seems to me terribly young because of my own age? Right, we cannot say that Feynman's life was cut short. Seventy was a good age at his generation.
I see this with my in-laws -they are in their late 80s and many of their friends of the same age are dying. To you and me it may seem natural that those nearing 90 should pass away of "old age" (BTW, almost no one dies purely of old age - there is usually some ailment that kills you), but to them it seems as if their friends are dying sooner than they should - it's hard to accept that your own age is past the human expiration date or even that you are approaching that date in not too many years.
I should add that 70 is the new 65 or 60. There are many who at 70 today remain vigorous and except for those with specific ailments, there is no reason why people cannot remain productive to at least 70 (and sometimes well beyond). In other posts you talk about raising the retirement age in Greece, Spain, etc. Since the 1930s in the US (when the 65 retirement age was set), life expectancies have risen more than 5 years ( in 1940, a male age 60 could "expect" to live 15 years, meaning that 1/2 would be dead within 15, while today a 60 yr old male can expect more than 20 years) but the retirement age has not moved, so that the pension system must pay pensions for 5 years more on average (or 50% more payments - from age 65 instead of 10 yrs of pension, 15 yrs must be paid on average - thus requiring 50% greater payments into the system in order to make it sell supporting. Meanwhile the # of workers paying in is falling due low birth rates, so fewer people are funding a growing # of retirees for more and more years. Another unsustainable situation. The specialty of modern man seems to be unsustainable situations.)
K
Necessity will, again, have to be the mother of invention.
Necessity will be the only thing bucking the natality trend.
Anon.
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