Commentary

“Sir, my dismay is great! Those spirits that I called, I now cannot control.” Nobel Prize-winning physicist Isidor Rabi used to be fond of observing that those who compare government-sponsored scientific research to a Faustian bargain have obviously never read Faust. Rabi made his comment with regard to America’s atomic scientists. But the image of the ambitious savant who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for great knowledge and thus great power is a common – indeed, probably the dominant – leitmotiv among those who write about the relationship between the scientist and the state. The tale by Goethe is a tragic one of ambition, arrogance, disillusionment, loss, and betrayal. True to the genre, all of those elements are present, to one degree or another, in the three articles written for this issue. While Professor Damms makes the valid point that most American scientists during the Cold War saw their work for the U.S. government as a matter of patriotic duty, and took justifiable pride in the effort, Professor Manzione’s paper leaves little doubt that many were not only willing to sell their souls for AEC or DOD research funding, but competed for the privilege. And, as RAND’s Dr. Marquis notes, their number included social scientists

Art history · Cold war · Duty · FAUST · Government (linguistics · Ivory tower · Physics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Pride · Privilege (computing · Soul · State (computer science · Theology · History · International Science and Diplomacy · Law · Philosophy · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

• Imagining a ‘Jewish atom bomb’, constructing a scientific diaspora

  Open Access•Or Rabinowitz, Yehonatan Abramson•Social Studies of Science•2022

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