Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

August 2, 1939, Einstein dictated a letter to FDR (drafted by Leo Szilard) alerting him to new developments in atomic energy: "A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory." The Nazis got their purest grade uranium from the same Belgian Congo mine "Shinkolobwe" as the Manhattan project, the majority of it.

In early 1947, Einstein told Newsweek, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb.” In fact, Einstein did no work in any capacity on the atomic bomb (or any nuclear weapons).


Newsweek (US Edition) (1947-March 10: Vol 29 Issue 10)

Contrary to popular belief, Einstein’s letter to FDR did not spawn the prompt creation of the Manhattan Project. In 2014, a nuke historian took a deep dive on how we discuss and frame Einstein’s very modest role in the creation of the Bomb...

On the other hand, this kind of science-fiction counterfactual can have its usefulness as a thought experiment. It isn’t history, but it can be used to illustrate some important aspects about the early history of the atomic bomb that a lot of people don’t know, and to undo a little bit of the “great man” obsession with bomb history. Albert Einstein has been associated with the bomb both through his famous mass-energy equivalence calculation (E=mc²) and because of the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to Roosevelt in 1939. On the face of it, this gives him quite a primary role, and indeed, he usually shows up pretty quickly at the beginning of most histories of the Manhattan Project. But neither E=mc² nor the Einstein-Szilard letter were as central to the Manhattan Project’s success as people realize — either scientifically or historically.

A note on the eccentric Hungarian, Leo Szilard, one of the "Martians" who emigrated to the United States during World War II: Could Leo Szilard have been tried as a war criminal? This was a question that Szilard himself posed in a 1949 story published in his book...


It is off course a work of fiction, but in the story "My Trial as a War Criminal", Szilard was serious about the questions it raised about the moral implications of the atomic bomb. That story begins after WW III has been fought. The Soviet Union has won, after using a new form of biological warfare (a virus) against the United States.


Read/download: The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories



Leo Szilard - Getty photos

Leo Szilard wrote his doctoral thesis ("Uber die thermodynamischen Schwankungserscheinungen" / About the thermodynamic fluctuation phenomena) on Maxwell's demon, a long-standing puzzle in the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics. Szilard was the first to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and Information theory.

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in which he suggested how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might hypothetically be violated. In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that fast molecules pass into the other chamber, while slow molecules remain in the first chamber. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon's behavior causes one chamber to warm up as the other cools, thus decreasing entropy and violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

“If you want to succeed in the world, you don't have to be much cleverer than other people. You just have to be one day earlier.”
― Leo Szilard

If you were curious on the "Martians" reference above, hello...


The Martians

No matter how you feel about the nuclear weapons and the billions upon billions spent & continue to be spent, it remains astounding that the Manhattan Project needed only 35 months (August 1942 to July 1945) during a world war to build from scratch all the facilities, physicists, thousands of workers from teenagers to elderly and acquire/manufacture all the materials to successfully design, test, assemble, and use multiple atomic bombs.





August 2, 2019, the Trump admin as advocated by neocon John Bolton, unilaterally and formally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first and only treaty to verifiably (or so we were told) eliminate an entire class of weaponry (2,692 nuclear-armed missiles in just three years).


Arms Control Association


However, there is an extensive collection of declassified documents from the National Security Archives on the negotiating history of the INF Treaty.

Cold War part Deux all over again.




Trump indicted over koi feeding technique.