Symposium on Atomic Energy and Its Implications

Résumé du livre

"On November 16-17, 1945 -- barely three months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- a joint meeting of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences was convened in Philadelphia to showcase reflections on "atomic energy and its implications" by a dozen of this country's most eminent natural and social scientists. In addition to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the speakers comprised physics and chemistry Nobelists Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, Irving Langmuir, Harold Urey, and Eugene Wigner; physicists Henry DeWolf Smyth and John Archibald Wheeler; Chicago Met Lab health director Robert Stone; prominent University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner; Rockefeller Foundation social science head Joseph Willits; and Canadian American historian and diplomat James Shotwell. The dozen symposium lectures, which were published in the first 1946 issue of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, are being reprinted here -- at a time of understandably renewed public concern about nuclear weapons -- as a stand-alone issue of the Transactions of the society, published in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Press." --