A little

less than five years after the

Japanese cities of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki were destroyed by

atomic bombs, a physicist and

Russian émigré

named Gregory Breit was given an

unusual job by the US

government. Other scientists had

been thinking about the "Super,"

the bomb that would use hydrogen

fusion to produce unimaginably

powerful explosions, and they

had one kind of nagging concern;

Robert Jungk describes this

concern in the book Brighter

Than a Thousand Suns. As Jungk

puts it, the possibility

"mentioned" by physicists

gathered on the campus at UC

Berkeley to discuss the bomb

("on a green lawn among high

cedars, or in one of the

many-windowed lecture rooms, to

the accompaniment of the regular

chiming of the campanile ...")

was that "an irresistible global

chain reaction might be released

by the Super, which would

transform the entire planet in a

short time into a flaming and

dying star."

Ah, yes, that

would be a pity. More tea,

Professor Teller? (No thank you,

Professor Oppenheimer. But do

try the scones.)

Breit worked

his slide rule, calculated the

half-life of the doomsday

shroud, and recommended that a

few scientific and military

leaders attempt to survive in

some of the nation's deepest

mine shafts. The military

leaders wholeheartedly agreed,

arguing forcefully against

allowing a "mine shaft gap."

Well, no - although a certain

movie does begin to look less

like apocalyptic slapstick and

more like a gritty social

documentary. Breit figured out,

of course, that a hydrogen bomb

could be exploded quite safely

indeed - and the rest is

history!

See how much fun it is

to learn new things? OK, let's

do philosophy next.

In the March

issue of The Atlantic Monthly, biologist,

author, and 40-year Harvard man

Edward O. Wilson declares - or

at least declares a hope for - a

return from chaos, an end to the

vagaries of postmodern notions;

we are, he insists, entirely

capable of marching toward

"consilience," toward a complete

and integrated understanding of

the universe and our place in

it. Leading the march, in

Wilson's vision, are the

clear-eyed apostles of a new

Enlightenment, empiricists who

will one day "reach agreement on

a common body of abstract

principles and evidential

proof;" who will arrive, that

is, at a "clear view of the

world as it really is," at the

"underlying cohesion" which

"promises that order, not chaos,

lies beyond the horizon."

So: Build sufficiently accurate

measuring devices and put in

some quality time at the

chalkboard, and you build a

tower of Inductive Fact that

stretches high enough to put you

face-to-face with God - or

permits you, at least, to see

the George Burns-shaped outlines

of whatever turns out to be the

ultimate and single reality. A

signal of this coming together,

Wilson argues, is that the many

disciplines of thought -

astronomy and biology, astronomy

and history, natural sciences

and liberal arts, Maya Angelou

and your squinty-eyed high

school chemistry teacher - will

increasingly grow to share the

same principles, like many ropes

twisting ever tighter circles

around a single pole; each rope

is attached to the same place at

one end, after all, and so can

only end up gathered closely

together, intertwined, united.

Not sure where the actual

tetherball fits into this

analogy, but work with us.

Standing contrary to this notion

of unity, Wilson adds, are "the

philosophical postmodernists, a

rebel crew milling beneath the

black flag of anarchy," who most

likely deserve to be placed "in

history's curiosity cabinet."

This, despite the fact that

their corrosive way of thinking

has "seeped, by now, into the

mainstream of the social

sciences and humanities" - oh,

and despite their threat to good

ol' empirical science, which

they view, subversively, as

"just another way of knowing."

Wilson is a prodigious

name-dropper, but the names he

uses - René Descartes and

Francis Bacon, mostly - are less

interesting than the names he

doesn't use: Werner Heisenberg,

say, or Albert Einstein. He does

dip a quick nod in the general