J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER 



be impoverished, blinded, and crippled were it not for the new 

 knowledge which is sought and found for other reasons. Tech- 

 nology gives back again to science a rich reward in new in- 

 struments, new techniques, and new powers. Some of the larg- 

 est questions that today agitate our curiosity and wonder relate 

 to the disposition and motion of the remotest nebulae, billions 

 of light years away. For evidence on this we look increasingly 

 to radioastronomy, which is based on microwave techniques, 

 largely developed for military purposes during and since World 

 War II. Chemistry and biochemistry are able to put and answer 

 questions not only of structure but of dynamics, because they 

 have available the neutrons and tracers which, in large measure, 

 are a byproduct of the industrial and military development of 

 nuclear fission. It is this incessant feedback and reciprocal fer- 

 tilization which makes a sharp distinction between pure science 

 and technology academic and dreary. There is also an important 

 traffic, not only in ideas and in equipment and in techniques, 

 but in men, between the two, a traffic without which both 

 would be the poorer. Indeed, the great lesson of the last decades 

 has been that men of science who have spent their whole lives in 

 the quest for new knowledge may be among the most gifted 

 practitioners of technology. 



Fermi came to the Los Alamos laboratory rather late, since 

 he had great responsibilities in seeing that the new reactors at 

 Oak Ridge and Hanford were in order. Shortly after he came, 

 he expressed to me some astonishment that so large a proportion 

 of the men in the laboratory, whom he had known in universi- 

 ties and seminars, were now more concerned with the practical 

 problems of bomb design than with the larger questions of 

 physics. Many kept that concern and those that developed from 

 it; many returned to the university and the classroom; and of 

 course, as in all large laboratories, there were some — some of 



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