IN THE QUIET ROOM
concerned, the lasting image left on my mind by Professor Oppenheimer’s Reith Lectures (3YC) is that of a screen pierced in two places to allow and record the passage of light. This, among sentences which leapt beyond me, was the one illustration to which the Professor returned to impress upon his audience the strange unpredictable nature of the minute charges of energy which underlie and uphold the more familiar universe to which we can still apply the Newtonian laws. But, accepting the truth of so much that is difficult in the "quiet room" of atomic physics whose not so quiet reverberations make world leaders anxious, it was interesting and unexpected to find with what humanity and wonder these studies were accompanied in the Professor's own mind. His was a constant going to and from his own room, constant references to the historical setting within which these studies took their rise, and a sustained effort to remember the needs of ordinary people. This, together with a sense of wonder akin to Newton’s own, gave to the lectures a welcome richness notably lacking from certain other records of research in very specialised fields. Ss" far as quantum physics is
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 10
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201IN THE QUIET ROOM New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 10
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