The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
Somewhere in the desert of New Mexico, at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the switch was thrown and a new light flashed through the dawn sky—the fireball of the first atomic bomb was ignited. The hidden energy inside the atomic nucleus was released. The world would never be the same.
In the years leading up to the Manhattan Project’s first detonation, many scientists believed that Germany was working on an atomic bomb. When J. Robert Oppenheimer was chosen to help lead the United States’ effort, the stakes were high: time and secrecy were essential. My uncle Chilton McDonnell and my aunt Bea were both involved. He was a chemist and she a secretary to Oppenheimer. They married afterward but didn’t reveal those roles to each other until years later. Security oaths meant keeping secrets from spouses. So it was a surprise to both of them.
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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Oppenheimer attracted amazing talents to the Los Alamos lab: Bohr, Bethe, Fermi, Feynman, Teller, Von Neumann, and many others. It was a hall of fame for physics brainpower. Feynman’s view was that it is not the power of authorities or experts or politicians or professors that defines science. Rather, science is the ability to repeat experiments, to reason it out on your own. It’s the way the world works. Not the path of least resistance. Check it out yourself.
The Manhattan Project’s teamwork would change forever the interaction of science, government, and the military. It’s a short leap from the collaboration in New Mexico to the idea of an independent lab focused on an engineering problem—something important enough to change the vector of history—where you could work alongside peers, who were also your generation’s best and brightest, and be guided by smart leadership. Didn’t that vision, that dream, become the model for Silicon Valley? Isn’t a similar kind of inspiration powering the push to develop intelligent machines?
For this issue of Alta Journal, we turned to author Jennet Conant to compare the work done by Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to the emergence of powerful AI software that might also disturb the universe. Will a new technology like AI become a weapon of mass destruction? Will technology and innovation help us achieve a happier, more equitable planet, or will they create new battlefields? Of course, it’s too soon to tell. So we try to look into the inner nature of the powerful technology of AI while knowing that threats produce innovation more often than periods of calm.
Alta has followed one element of the Oppenheimer model, relentlessly seeking to recruit great talent to our project. We spend part of every quarter reaching out to authors, thinkers, designers, creators, and our own staff with these questions: Whom should we ask to contribute? What are you reading? What and who will give our readers some extra insight?
In our “Gimme Shelter” special section, we celebrate various forms of home and hearth. We still rely on human-scale creators to make our lives comfortable and beautiful. This is the essential conflict of our generation. Can we fashion a balance between the amazing capabilities of technology to transform our lives and the fundamental pleasures of life—family, home, art, institutions?
Our contributors remind us that our built environment will need to respond to climate change. Doug Peacock was the model for Edward Abbey’s George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang, bent on blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam. For this issue, Peacock proposes a more peaceful resolution: drain Lake Powell and let the Colorado go as a river.
After one of the wildest winters in recent memory—rampant flooding, the deepest Sierra snowpack in 40 years—Julian Smith revisits California’s great deluge of 1862, which killed an estimated 4,000 people and transformed the Central Valley into a lake: 12 feet deep, 500 miles long, and 150 miles wide. Smith’s article concludes that climate change will surely bring more epic floods; it’s just a matter of when.
As Feynman suggests, the big questions should not be resolved by great powers or experts, but by other smart people. The simple experience of our own lives is how we find the best path forward.•
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
