I am sure we are agreed that the ultimate survival of America is dependent on intellectual vigor and on spiritual deeprooting -- not on specific devices which are always for the moment. It has politics. The future of the scientists' America, and yours and mine, lies fundamentally with education -- that which is taught to the young in our schools -- that which is taught throughout life in the media of general communication by the contemporary writers. Fundamental are respect and zeal for scholarship, a lively regard for moral values, and a love of truth. And of these the last is, of course, the greatest. The atom has no ethics of its own any more than.
American banker and chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1896-1974)
Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (January 31, 1896 - January 21, 1974) was an American government official, businessman, philanthropist, and naval officer. He was one of the original members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1946, and he served as the commission's chair in the 1950s. Strauss was a major figure in the development of nuclear weapons after World War II, nuclear energy policy, and nuclear power in the United States. During World War II, Strauss served as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and rose to the rank of rear admiral due to his work in the Bureau of Ordnance in managing and rewarding plants engaged in production of munitions. Strauss was the driving force behind the controversial hearings, held in April and May 1954 before an AEC Personnel Security Board, in which physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. As a result, Strauss has often been regarded as a villain in American history. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nomination of Strauss to become U.S. secretary of commerce resulted in a prolonged, public political battle in 1959 where Strauss was not confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
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Alternative Names:
Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss
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Lewis L. Strauss
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Transmutation of the elements, -- unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered, -- these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, -- will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, -- will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, -- and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.
The President had unequivocally said that we would never use atomic weapons except against an aggressor. None of us like the idea of using them -- not least those of us who are engaged in their production -- but these reservations, which are the result of our moral principles, can be used, and are being used, by our enemies to trap and confound us. We must see the problem in its full perspective. We are not making weapons for conquest or aggression, or to impose our system on other peoples. Our sole purpose in having them is that we may not fall easy prey to others who have no such reservations, -- and who lack them because they lack the moral springs from which they might arise. Our reservations and principles do us proud but we cannot allow them to disarm us. For if ever they did, those principles would disappear from the face of the earth.
No matter how voluminous and complete our semi-annual reports may be, we know that the general public does not see them and could not be expected to do so. If they were written for popular consumption, they would be unusable as formal documents. On the other hand, our interim releases to the effect that we have awarded such and such research contracts, released such and such patents, or let a contract for a plant at so and so, -- are, at best, of very local and topical concern. About the best way that the unspecialized public gets any insight into our work is through what you publish and the use made of it by the media of radio and television.
Even "security", that word so fretful to science and to the free exchange of ideas, is no modern innovation. Witness Bacon's elaborate encrypting of his work, Newton's allegedly purposeful distortion of a formula, Da Vinci who kept his long undeciphered notebooks in mirror-writing, and other examples that might be cited where the aim was apparently to prevent harm from ensuing as a result of the unexpert use of knowledge or wrong intent. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, that favorite fable of the laboratory assistant who learns the spell to make the mop carry water but who does not know how to stop the operation once it has begun, suggests the cataclysmic consequence where the sorcerer had not been sufficiently "security-minded" with, his formula. That might be a very, old piece of science-writing.
Science-writing is a very old-profession. Science probably separated from witchcraft when science-writing began. Just so long as information was passed along by word of mouth only, it was always susceptible to control by a few for their own benefit and to mystify the many. When it began to be written about, science came up out of the atmosphere of the cauldron and the alembic.