A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story
A now little-known manuscript prepared by nine young physicists as a statement about the futility of scientific secrecy quickly became a test of the limits of free discourse in the nuclear age.
A State of Rumor: Low Knowledge, Nuclear Fear, and the Scientist as Security Risk
In January 1954, Alan T. Waterman, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), invited Charles B. Hunt, executive director of the American Geological Institute, to serve as a consultant to the NSF’s earth sciences program. Hunt declined, partly because of constraints on his time, but also because he had grown impatient with the regimen of loyalty and security checks required for such positions. “In recent years,” he informed Waterman, “I have become increasingly fed up with the fact that the government seems to be incapable of determining the dependability of a citizen without insulting him. And, I have become increasingly fed up with the fact that the iron curtain of secrecy has been lowered around many scientific activities that are not related to national security. Such an environment simply is distasteful to me, and so much so that I want no more of it.” 1  Such frustrations among scientists were far from unusual in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as loyalty and security tests, once nonexistent, became commonplace in American scientifi c life. Depending on their political proclivities, most scientists viewed such tests as either a patriotic duty, a necessary
Developmental aphasia: The perception of brief vowels and extended stop consonants
Abstract Developmental dysphasics and matched controls were examined for their ability to discriminate (a) two synthesized vowel-vowel syllables and (b) two synthesized consonant- vowel syllables. For both vowels and consonants, dysphasics were impaired when the discriminable components of the two stimuli were brief (43 msec) but unimpaired when these components were 95 msec or longer. It is concluded that developmental dysphasics have no difficulty in discriminating transitional auditory information as such and that their impaired discrimination of synthesized stop consonants is attributable solely to the brief duration of the discriminable components.