The Nuclear Muse

The Nuclear Muse urges its readers to cross the boundary between the humanities and the sciences. John Canaday dives deep into the volumes of discourse involved in the construction of the first atomic bombs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to discover the role rhetoric plays in the formulation and expression of scientific ideas. Using techniques of literary criticism, Canaday analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists before, during, and after the Second World War. These include Niels Bohr's presentations of complementarity in "The Quantum Postulate"; the Blegdamsvej Faust, a dramatic production in which a group of physicists rewrote Goethe's Faust with themselves as the main characters; The Los Alamos Primer, the technical lectures used for training newcomers to Los Alamos; the Los Alamos scientists' descriptions of their work and of the Trinity test; and Leo Szilard's post-war novella, The Voice of the Dolphins. By refusing to give in to the common notion that science is a language foreign to non-scientists, The Nuclear Muse offers new insights into the methods of nuclear physics and underscores the relation of physics to other social forms of knowledge.