Clippings

Von Neumann believed that the possibility of a universal automaton was ultimately responsible for the possibility of indefinitely continued biological evolution. In evolving from simpler to more complex organisms you do not have to redesign the basic biochemical machinery as you go along. You have only to modify and extend the genetic instructions. Everything we have learned about evolution since 1948 tends to confirm that von Neumann was right.

[Feynman] was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said the he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.

[Richard Feynman] talked of his dead wife, of the joy he had had in nursing her and making her last days tolerable, of the tricks they had played together on the Los Alamos security people, of her jokes and her courage. He talked of death with an easy familiarity which can come only to one who has lived with spirit unbroken through the worst that death can do. Ingmar Bergman in his film The Seventh Seal created the character of the juggler Jof, always joking and playing the fool, seeing visions and dreams that nobody else believes in, surviving at the end when death carries the rest away. Dick and Jof have a great deal in common. Many people at Cornell had told me Dick was crazy. In fact he was the sanest of the whole crowd.

[Secretary of War] Stimson was well aware of the enormous quantitative difference in destructive potential between nuclear and conventional bombs, but it was difficult for him to feel that there was a difference in the quality of evil between the killing of 130,000 people by old-fashioned fire bombs in Tokyo and the killing of about the same number by a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. … The ground on which Stimson might have been able to make a moral stand was already surrendered when the fire bombing started in March. Long before that, in England and in America independently, the moral issues had been effectively prejudged when the decisions were made to build strategic bomber forces and to wage war with them against civilian populations. Hiroshima was only an afterthought.