"You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?"
"Have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."
18 likes
Source: The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb. Documentary film, 1981.
About the author