I have been much concerned that in this world we have so largely lost the ability to talk with one another. In the great succession of deep discoveries, we have become removed from one another in tradition, and in a certain measure even in language. We have had neither the time nor the skill nor the dedication to tell one another what we have learned, nor to listen nor to hear, nor to welcome its enrichment of the common culture and the common understanding. We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1960 address in Berlin, quoted in Oppenheimer by I.I. Rabi et al
Oppenheimer!
Behind his back his friends said
he was crazy when he fled from them
to be a poet,
once the best physicist in the world
and now, when the atomic bomb is almost ready!
Lunatic!
-- Leszek Czuchajowski
