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.
CONTROL OF INFORMATION RELATING TO ATOMIC ENERGY
IN the year 1633, Galileo was summoned by the Office of the Inquisition from Florence to Rome, there to submit himself to a catechetical examination by a court of Cardinals. The heresies of which he was "vehemently suspected" pertained to doctrinal matters, though scientific rather than religious or political. Galileo had advocated and extended the forbidden cosmology of Copernicus and had, in effect, discredited the "official" cosmology of Ptolemy. The outcome of this historic event is well known. Galileo was forced to abjure his heretical opinions; but the Inquisition treated him "with a consideration unexampled in its history" and the punishment inflicted upon him was comparatively mild. Science had all but won that freedom which it was shortly to attain, and which it was to enjoy in increasing measure for two centuries while it grew powerful in influence and opulent in prestige. In the main, this freedom was established as a by-product of the process by which other freedoms-of religious worship, of speech, of the press, of assembly-were won. The crucial battles were fought on other fronts, and the freedom of scientific communication emerged as a natural corollary of the general principle established in this struggle-that neither lay nor ecclesiastical authorities could impose their conformities on the conscience and critical intelligence of man. By the middle of the nineteenth century the general cause of freedom seemed definitely won, and if the principle was not universally established, it was at any rate firmly in the ascendant. To be sure, there were interludes of shadow and eclipse. In the realm of science, facts, the "fortifications of reason", were not always sufficient bulwark against the forces of bigotry and reaction. But on the whole, progress
The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics
In his 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard on “The Uses of the University,” Clark Kerr, then chancellor of the burgeoning University of California, observed that the faculty of the emergent cold war universities had become “affluent,” and that their “salaries and status have risen considerably.” Most telling of all, their roles and ways of life had changed palpably from the prewar days: “A professor’s life has become, it is said, ‘a rat race of business and activity, managing contracts and projects, guiding teams and assistants, bossing crews of technicians, making numerous trips, sitting on committees for government agencies, and engaging in other distractions necessary to keep the whole frenetic business from collapse.’” In short, Kerr concluded, the cold war university was neither a village nor a town, as older colleges and universities had been modeled, but rather a city—he called it a “City of Intellect” and a “city of infinite variety”—full of distinct subcultures, complex economies of operation, and vast managerial infrastructures. Kerr celebrated the modern, urbanized university, “rat race” and all. Other commentators read a different lesson into these structural changes in American higher education. The cold war university was not a grand and exciting city, they contended, but rather the ultimate suburb—and, as such, hardly deserving of praise. Irving Howe, for example, lambasted postwar literary intellectuals in a scathing 1954 Partisan Review article titled “This Age of Conformity.” Intellectuals, Howe charged, had succumbed to the “temptations of an improved standard of living” and had sunk “into suburbs, country homes, and college towns.” With this descent into suburbia came a “desire to retreat into the caves of bureaucratic caution” and “intellectual conformity.”