The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is an edited transcript of an interview with Richard Feynman. He talks openly about how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

Invitation to the Bomb

While working on his PhD thesis, Feynman was asked to join the project to develop the atomic bomb.

It was a completely different kind of thing. It would mean that I would have to stop the research in what I was doing, which is my life’s desire, to take time off to do this, which I felt I should do in order to protect civilization. Okay? So that was what I had to debate with myself. My first reaction was, well, I didn’t want to get interrupted in my normal work to do this odd job. There was also the problem, of course, of any moral thing involving war. I wouldn’t have much to do with that, but it kinda scared me when I realized what the weapon would be, and that since it might be possible, it must be possible. There was nothing that I knew that indicated that if we could do it they couldn’t do it, and therefore it was very important to try to cooperate.

(In early 1943 Feynman joined Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos).

US Army An image that changed the world - the Mushroom Cloud over Hiroshima

With regard to moral questions, I do have something I would like to say about it. The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work. All kinds of attempts were made to redesign it to make it a worse bomb and so on. But what I did, - immorally I would say – was to not remember the reason that I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, because Germany was defeated, not the singlest thought came to my mind at all about that, that that, meant now I would have to reconsider why I am continuing to do this. I simply didn’t think, okay?

Success and Suffering

On 6 August 1945 the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima.