The Sciences and Man's Community
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 1953
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith Lecturer is American theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he has been described as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project while Director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory between 1943–45. In his Reith lectures entitled 'Science and the Common Understanding', he examines the impact of quantum and atomic theory on society.
In his sixth and final lecture entitled 'The Sciences and Man's Community', Professor Oppenheimer explains how the "House of Science" helps us to understand the underlying profundities of the earth and our lives. He draws parallels between the construction of human society and the atom: each man is dependent on the next, and through the power of the collective, Man's power grows with the shared knowledge of individuals.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.8 | This lecture in the series Science and the Common Understanding, |
| 0:08.8 | given by Robert Oppenheimer, was originally broadcast in 1953. |
| 0:14.2 | For some moments during these lectures, |
| 0:17.5 | we have looked together into one of the rooms of the house called science. This is a relatively |
| 0:22.8 | quiet room that we know as quantum theory or atomic theory. The great girders which frame it, |
| 0:29.9 | the lights and shadows and vast windows. These were the work of a generation our predecessor, |
| 0:36.1 | more than two decades ago. It is not wholly quiet. Young people |
| 0:40.8 | visit it and study in it and pass on to other chambers. From time to time, someone rearranges a |
| 0:46.9 | piece of furniture to make the whole more harmonious. And many, as we have done, peer through its windows |
| 0:53.8 | or walk through it as sightseers. |
| 0:56.0 | It is not so old, but that one can hear the sound of the new wings being built nearby, |
| 1:03.0 | where men walk high in the air to erect new scaffoldings, |
| 1:07.0 | not unconscious of how far they may fall. |
| 1:10.0 | All about, there are busy workshops where the builders are active, |
| 1:14.6 | and very near indeed are those of us who learning more of the primordial structure of matter |
| 1:20.6 | hope someday for chambers as fair and lovely as that in which we have spent the years of our youth and our prime. |
| 1:29.9 | It is a vast house indeed. |
| 1:32.7 | It doesn't appear to have been built upon any plan, |
| 1:36.3 | but to have grown as a great city grows. |
| 1:38.8 | There is no central chamber, no one corridor from which all others debouch. |
| 1:44.2 | All about the periphery men are at work, studying the vast riches of space and the state |
... |
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