J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER 



to the costs, and in many cases we hope the value, of the prac- 

 tical developments based on such study. We mav remember 

 that Rutherford, who first understood nuclear transmutations, 

 and who first induced them experimentally, held the then not 

 unreasonable view that no practical use would be found on 

 earth for nuclear energy. 



We see in the great industrial societies of our time a very 

 rapid and massive exploitation of new knowledge for practical 

 ends. It would seem that there have been other cultures and 

 other societies which did not act so, in which discoveries were 

 unexploited for centuries. The example of which we have all 

 been taught, not quite accurately, is the Chinese discovery of 

 gunpowder, whose use was limited by them to pyrotechnics. I 

 have some sympathy with the many who say that we should 

 have followed their example in our dealings with the discovery 

 of nuclear fission. But that is not for our time or style, nor is 

 it likely to be for the changing emerging societies of the com- 

 ing century. Most elaborate and beautiful mathematical meth- 

 ods were developed in Sumer and Babylon, which were initially 

 responsive to the practical needs of the time: the prediction of 

 eclipses, of conjunctions and first risings. These relatively ad- 

 vanced methods, which had, it is true, no element of kinematics 

 or dynamics, seem to have been pursued for the love of tech- 

 nique and knowledge and virtuosity, and never to have been 

 applied to any of the other problems for which they were suited. 



In our world we will do something with new knowledge. 

 The American Philosophical Society was founded for "the pro- 

 motion of useful knowledge," and the Royal Society, its prede- 

 cessor, had, in the words of its historian Thomas Sprat, a related 

 purpose : 



Their Purpose is, in short, to make faithful Records of all the 

 Works of Nature, or Art, which can come within their Reach; 

 that so the present Age, and Posterity, may be able to put a Mark 



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