Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs

SYNOPSIS

The Nuclear Muse analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists and writers before, during, and after the Second World War, including H.G. Wells's The World Set Free; Niels Bohr's "The Quantum Postulate"; the Blegdamsvej Faust, a parody of Goethe's Faust that cast physicists as its principal characters; The Los Alamos Primer, the technical lectures used for training at Los Alamos; scientists' descriptions of their work at Los Alamos and of the Trinity test; Leo Szilard's postwar novella, "The Voice of the Dolphins"; and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. By exploring the relationship between scientific and literary uses of language, The Nuclear Muse offers new insights into the methods of nuclear physics, the dynamic whereby nuclear weapons became social artifacts, and the common ground between physics and other forms of human knowledge.

About The Author
John Canaday is a prize-winning poet and playwright who has been a Watson Fellow and the Starbuck Fellow in Poetry at Boston University. He tutors students in literature, writing, history, mathematics, and physics in the Boston area.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Canaday, a poet and playwright who has been a Watson Fellow and a Starbuck Fellow in Poetry at Boston University, analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists before, during, and after WWII, including Niels Bohr's "The Quantum Postulate"; the technical lectures used for training at Los Alamos; scientist's descriptions of their work and of the Trinity test; and Leo Szilard's postwar novella, . He looks at physicists' use of figurative language in the development of quantum theory, and examines the role played by the rhetorics of exploration and religion in the construction of the Los Alamos community. Includes b&w historical photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

C.P. Snow identified the two cultures of science and the humanities. John Canaday interweaves them, engaging through literary criticism the "texts" of nuclear physics. For Canaday those texts range widely, and include the words of physicists struggling to grasp the quantum world; the "Los Alamos Primer," explaining the Manhattan Project to newly arrived Los Alamites; and even the bomb itself, whose existence as a literary device is, Canaday demonstrates, as significant as its military and political reality. A fascinating and literate glimpse at the words, metaphors, texts, and subtexts that have shaped our nuclear age.(Richard Wolfson, Physicist and author of Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology)  — Richard Wolfson

Physicists in the first half of this century became caught up in knowledge, ways of doing science, military projects, and in social consequences that pushed their means of representation and understanding to the limit. John Canaday's important study reveals how physicists adopted literary modes of expression to come to terms with the worlds they were making and transforming.(Charles Bazerman, author of Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science)  — Charles Bazerman

A central problem of modern thought, how the way we describe the world affects our understanding of it, arises nowhere more dramatically than in relation between literary and scientific languages. The Nuclear Muse is a revelatory exploration of this relation which John Canaday analyzes with an exceptional sophistication combining analytical rigor and a wonderful aesthetic and moral sensibility.(Myra Jehlen, Board of Governors Chair of Literatures, Rutgers University)  — Myra Jehlen

The rhetoric of the early nuclear age shaped our attitudes toward The Bomb and our illusions about its value to our diplomacy and military security. John Canaday's interesting and insightful study has added a fourth dimension to our understanding of how we 'learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. (Martin J. Sherwin, Walter S. Dickson Professor of History, Tufts University, author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies)  — Martin J. Sherwin