Paul Virilio Quotes
I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
Virilio, Paul. "From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Virilio." Interview by John Armitage. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 16, no. 5-6, 1999, pp. 25-55.
Meitner and her nephew Frisch had been the first people to realize that the atom had been split. Meitner had described the process to her nephew and he made some drawings of the process she described. A few of these looked like a bacteria dividing. Frisch happened to meet with William A. Arnold, an American Biologist doing research in Stockholm. He asked Arnold what the biologists called it when a bacteria divided, and he replied, “fission”. Frisch told his aunt and she decided that they should use that term in the scientific article they were preparing on the splitting of the atom.
Hitler’s concept of a “New World Order” was the Conquest of Europe by Germany and thereafter the control be Nazi Germany. Germany’s ally, Japan, also used the idea of a New Asian Order where peace would be brought to Asia controlled and enforced by Japan.
The letter was actually delivered to President Roosevelt on October 11. It was the stimulus for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. It had been drafted in large part by physicist Leo Szilard whose idea it was that Einstein sign the letter. As the world’s most prestigious scientist Einstein, Szilard felt, would make more of an impression on FDR than he, Fermi or other scientists even though Einstein was a theoretician and never did work on the development of the bomb. The military men did not understand Szilard and thought him a danger to the nation. So the two men who initiated the idea of the development of an atom bomb did not do any, of the work on it.
This was the first description of Radioactive Decay.
Morrison was then a graduate student of Oppenheimer. The quotation is important, not because it shows how quickly the “father of the atomic bomb” realized that a nuclear bomb could be made and how, but how relatively easy and rapid it was for a competent theoretical physicist could conceptually design a nuclear weapon if they first had knowledge of the Hahn / Strassmann Experiment and the Meitner / Frisch explanation of what had happened ({640924}). Note Leo Szilard’s letter at about the same time--{640925}.
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
