Marcel Pagnol Quotes
One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.
Pagnol, Marcel. Critique des critiques. Éditions Nagel, 1947.
What makes this quote important historically is to realize the assurances that he had to give the press and the public. This shows the level of anxiety about nuclear science that existed at the time and some of the absurd claims that critics and skeptics made. While it was true that there were same dangers in the nuclear testing, some of which the authorities were ignorant of, they were not of the expansive catastrophic magnitude that the critics claimed. Almost all new science and technology develops a Luddite community of opponents who want the technology stopped or at least slowed much. These opponents almost always exaggerate dangers in order to alarm public opinion via fear. At the same time, almost all the new scientific arenas eventually display and disclose problems and potential dangers of which the scientists and policy makers originally unaware. But they are almost always different from those the original critics claim. For example instead of environmental concern for radiation caused mutations in the animal life or the problem of what to do with radioactive byproducts of making atomic weapons, the warnings were that the water would flow out of the oceans and that gravity would be nullified.
The Iranian religious theocrat of Iran sees the issue as one where the United States is trying to keep nuclear technology from Iran and other Islamic countries. He seems to discount his own often uttered calls for “death to America” and the statements of intended war with the United States by the leading military officer of Iran. See {624408}.
This reflected a commonly held belief that the gun was an ignoble invention.
He was the first man to see the experimental evidence of nuclear power and he realized that it had the potential for an incredibly powerful weapon. It was his message about the possibilities about the atomic bomb that Albert Einstein transmitted to FDR, leading to American development of the bomb.(See {624449}.) By the time the atomic bomb had been developed, Germany had surrendered and Szilard and others felt that there was no longer a need to beat the Germans to the development. So he went from the biggest enthusiast to the most serious opponent.
This declaration, drafted by Russell and Einstein two days before Einstein’s death was signed by a number of other prominent scientists.
This problem is still with us. Nuclear proliferation, dirty radioactive bombs, and terrorism are potential down sides of radioactivity.
While this is generally true, from the scientific point of view, it is not quite right. The layman and most engineers believe that scientists discover things that exist. Although they do most of the time, breakthrough’s of the last century have for example discovered new chemical elements, but there are a few that science has CREATED—they exist nowhere in nature. Scientists are beginning to develop new life forms as well as discovering already existing ones. For over a century now the science of metallurgy has created thousands of alloys that did not previously exist.
One fascinating thing about this quotation is the date. It would be the next 150 years where the great scientific leaps would take place. There was no inkling of computers or nuclear weapons.
He made this quotation in a discussion about nuclear weapons, but the principle is valid for many areas from the Internet to pharmaceuticals. In the nuclear weapons case there have been a number of accidents – including fatal ones – over the years and on several occasions a nuclear weapon came close to detonating near populated areas. In one case, radiation damage from a crash of a nuclear weapons equipped bomber have made an area in Spain unusable for years into the future.
Marcel Paul Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Regarded as an auteur, in 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie française. Although his work is less fashionable than it once was, Pagnol is still generally regarded as one of France's greatest 20th-century writers and is notable for the fact that he excelled in almost every medium—memoir, novel, drama and film.
