A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy

I had an occasion to read this fantastic book over the last couple of months. This book is a compilation by Hao Wang, a confidante of Kurt Gödel. Compiled over ten years it contains Gödel’s views on a wide array of areas. Some of these insights are little known, some are very interesting and some just show that Gödel was just as human in making errors.

This is an unadulterated chronicle of a brilliant mind. I don’t know what else to say to suggest this book. It is a must read for anyone with a remote interest in Mathematical Logic, Philosophy and Kurt Godel.

A Logical Journey - From Godel to Philosophy

[Click on the image to buy this book or click here]

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Here is an introduction to the book and the author.

Hao Wang (1921-1995) was one of the few confidantes of the great mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. A Logical Journey is a continuation of Wang’s Reflections on Kurt Gödel and also elaborates on discussions contained in From Mathematics to Philosophy. A decade in preparation, it contains some important and unfamiliar insights into Gödel’s views on a wide range of issues, from Platonism and the nature of logic, to minds and machines, the existence of god, and positivism and phenomenology.

The impact of Gödel’s theorem on twentieth century thought is on a par with that of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Keynesian economics. These previously unpublished intimate and informal conversations, however, bring to light and amplify Gödel’s other major contributions to logic and philosophy. They reveal that there is much more in Gödel’s philosophy of mathematics than is commonly realized, and more in his philosophy than just a philosophy of mathematics.

Wang writes that “it is even possible that his quite informal and loosely structured conversations with me, which I am freely using in this book, will turn out to be the fullest existing expression of the diverse components of his inadequately articulated general philosophy”

I will leave you with some quotes from the book. Unless mentioned, they are by Kurt Gödel.

1. To develop the skill of correct thinking is in the first place to learn what you have to disregard. In order to go on, you have to know what to leave out: this is the essence  of effective thinking. (1972, from chapter 1 – Gödel’s life)

2. I would not say that one cannot polemicize against Nietzsche. But it should of course also be a writer [Dichter] or a person of the same type to do that. (17.2.48)

3. What you say about sadness is right : if there were a completely hopeless sadness, there would be nothing beautiful in it. But I believe there can rationally be no such thing. Since we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted exactly as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born into exactly these and no other external relations: why then should we presume to know exactly this to be all  at there is no other world and that we shall never be in yet another one? (27.2.50)

4. One. cannot really say that complete ignorance is sufficient ground for hopelessness . If e.g. someone will land on an island completely unknown to him, it is just as likely that it is inhabited by harmless people as that it is by cannibals, and his ignorance gives no reason for hopelessness , but rather for hope. Your aversion against occult phenomena is of course well justified to the extent that we are here facing a hard-to-disentangle mixture of deception, credulousness and stupidity, with genuine phenomena. But the result (and the meaning) of the deception is, in my opinion, not to fake genuine phenomena but to conceal them. (3.4.50)

5. Is the book about Einstein really so hard to understand? I think that prejudice against and fear of every “abstraction” may also be involved here, and if you would attempt to read it like a novel (without wanting to understand right away everything at the 6rst reading), perhaps it would not seem so incomprehensible to you. (8.1.51)

6. As you know, I am indeed also thoroughly anti nationalistic, but one cannot, I believe, decide hastily against the possibility that people like Bismarck have the honorable intention to do something good. (7.11.56)

7. About the relation of art and kitsch we have, I believe, already discussed many times before. It is similar to that between light and heavy music. One could, however, hardly assert that all good music must be tragic? (23.3.57)

8. It is always enjoyable to see that there are still people who value a certain measure of idealism. (12.11.61)

9. Of all that we experience, there eventually of course remains only a memory, but just in this way all lasting things retain some of their actuality. (24.3.63)

10. She was not a beauty, but she was an extraordinarily intelligent person and had an extremely important role [in his life], because she was actually what one calls the life-line. She connected him to the earth. Without her, he could not exist at all.

A complicated marriage, but neither could exist without the other. And the idea that she should die before him was unthinkable for him. It is fortunate that he died before her. He was absolutely despondent when she was sick. He said, “Please come to visit my wife.”

She once told me, ‘I have to hold him like a baby.”  (1.4.2-3-4,  Alice Von Kahler on Adele and Kurt Godel)

Einstein and Godel at IAS, Princeton

11.The one man who was, during the last years, certainly by far Einstein‘s best friend, and in some ways strangely resembled him most was Kurt Godel,  the great logician. They were very different in almost every personal way- Einstein gregarious, happy, full of laughter and common sense, and Godel extremely solemn,very serious, quite solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a means of arriving at the truth. But they shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things (in Holton and Elkena, Straus 1982:422).

12. Einstein has often told me that in the late years of his life he has continually sought Godel’s company in order to have discussions with him. Once he said to me that his own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely to have the privilege to walk home with Godel. [“The late years” probably began in 1951 , when Einstein stopped working on the unified theory. 1.6.2 Oskar Morgenstern]

13. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point, however , is to change it. (Karl Marx, Theses on Feverbach 1845, Chapter 3)

14. The place which philosophy has occupied in Chinese civilization has been comparable to that of religion in other civilizations. In the world of the future, man will have philosophy in the place of religion. This is consistent with the Chinese tradition. It is not necessary that man should be religious, but it is necessary that he should be philosophical. When he is philosophical he has the very best of the blessings of religion. (Fung1 948:1, 6).

15. Engaging in philosophy is salutary in any case, even when no positive results emerge from it (and I remain perplexed). It has the effect  [Wirkung] that “the color [is] brighter,” that is, that reality appears more clearly as such. This observation reveals that , according to Godel’s conception , the study of philosophy helps us to see reality more distinctly , even though it may happen that no (communicable ) positive results come out of it to help others.

16. In presenting these conversations, you should pay attention to three principles: (1) deal only with certain points; (2) separate out the important and the new; and (3) pay attention to connections. Godel, 5 February 1976

17. The notion of existence is one of the primitive concepts with which we must begin as given. It is the clearest concept we have. Even “all”, as studied in predicate logic, is less clear, since we don’t have an overview of the whole world. We are here thinking of the weakest and the broadest sense of existence. For example, things which act are different from things which don’t. They all have existence proper to them. (4.4.12)

18. Existence: we know all about it, there is nothing concealed. The concept of existence helps us to form a good picture of reality. It is important for supporting a strong philosophical view and for being open-minded in reaching it. (4.4.13)

19. Power is a quality that enables one to reach one’s goals. Generalities contain the laws which enable you to reach your goals. Yet a preoccupation with power distracts us from paying attention to what is at the foundation of the world, and it fights against the basis of rationality. (4.4.14)

20. The world tends to deteriorate: the principle of entropy. Good things appear from time to time in single persons and events. But the general development tends to be negative. New extraordinary characters emerge to prevent the downward movement. Christianity was best at the beginning. Saints slow down the downward movement. In science, you may say, it is different. But progress occurs not in the sense of understanding the world, only in the sense of dominating the world, for which the means remains, once it is there. Also general knowledge though not in the deeper sense of first principles, has moved upwards. Specifically, philosophy tends to go down. (4.4.15)

21. The view that existence is useful but not true is widely held; not only in mathematics but also in physics, where it takes the form of regarding only the directly observable [by sense perception] as what exists. This is a prejudice of the time. The psychology behind it is not the implicit association of existence with time, action, and so on. Rather the association is with the phenomenon that consistent but wrong assumptions are useful sometimes. Falsity is in itself something evil but often serves as a tool for finding truth. Unlike objectivism, however, the false assumptions are useful only temporarily and intermediately. (4.4.16)

22. Einstein’s religion is more abstract, like that of Spinoza and Indian philosophy. My own religion is more similar to the religion of the churches. Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. There are spirits which have no body but can communicate with and influence the world. They keep [themselves] in the background today and are not known. It was different in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, when there were miracles. Think about deja vu and thought transference. The nuclear processes, unlike the chemical , are irrelevant to the brain.

23. The possible worldviews [can be divided] into two groups [conceptions]: skepticism, materialism and positivism stand on one [the left] side; spiritualism, idealism and theology on the other [the right]. The truth lies in the middle,or consists in a combination of these two conceptions. (Chapter 5)

24. Some reductionism is right: reduce to concepts and truths, but not to sense perceptions. Really it should be the other way around: Platonic ideas [what Husserl calls “essences ” and Godel calls “concepts”] are what things are to be reduced to. Phenomenology makes them [the ideas] clear. (5.3.15)

25. Introspection is an important component of thinking; today it has a bad reputation. Introspective psychology is completely overlooked today. Epoche concerns how introspection should be used, for example, to detach oneself from influences of external stimuli (such as the fashions of the day). Even the scientists (fashions of the day). Even the scientists [sometimes] do not agree because they are not [detached true] subjects [ in this sense].

26. Positivists decline to acknowledge any apriori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience, referring to higher mental phenomena as “judgments”. They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is, excluding phenomenological experience. Russell (in his 1940 (Inquiry into Meaning and Truth]) made a more drastic mistake in speaking as if sense experience were the only experience we can find by introspection.

27. For approaching the central part of philosophy, there is good reason to confine one’s attention to reflections on mathematics. Physics is perhaps less well suited for this purpose; Newtonian physics would be better. (Chapter 9)

28. The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact. (Chapter 9)

29. Whole and part– partly concrete parts and partly abstract parts- are at the bottom of everything. They are most fmtdamental in our conceptual system. Since there is similarity, there are generalities. Generalities are just a fundamental aspect of the world. It is a fundamental fact of reality that there are two kinds of reality: universals and particulars (or individuals).

30. Zhi zhi wei zhi zhi, bu zhi wei bu zhi, shi zhi ye. (To know that you know when you do know and know that you do not know when you do not know: that is knowledge .) Confucius, Analects, 2: 17. (Epilogue).

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The Emerging Mind

About two months back I came across a series of Reith lectures given by professor Vilayanur Ramachandran, Dr Ramachandran holds a MD from Stanley Medical College and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge University and is presently the director of the center for Brain and cognition at the University of California at San Diego and an adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. Dr Ramachandran is known for his work on behavioral neurology, which promises to greatly enhance our understanding of the human brain, which could be the key in my opinion in making “truly intelligent” machines.

[Dr VS Ramachandran: Image Source- TED]

I heard these lectures two three times and really enjoyed them and was intrigued by the cases he presents. Though these are old lectures (they were given in 2003), they are new to me and I think they are worth sharing anyway.

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For those who are not aware, the Reith lectures were started by the British Broadcasting Corporation radio in 1948. Each year a person of high distinction gives these lectures. The first were given by mathematician Bertrand Russell. They were named so in the honor of the first director general of the BBC- Lord Reith. Like most other BBC presentations on science, politics and philosophy they are fantastic. Dr Ramachandran became the first from the medical profession to speak at Reith.

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The 2003 series named The Emerging Mind has five lectures, each being roughly about 28-30 minutes. Each are a trademark of Dr Ramachandran with funny anecdote, witty arguments, very intersting clinical cases, the best pronunciation of “billions” since Carl Sagan, and let me not mention the way he rolls the RRRRRRRs while talking. Below I don’t intend to write what the lectures are about, I think they should be allowed to talk for themselves.

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Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain

Listen to Lecture 1 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 2: Synapses and the Self

Listen to Lecture 2 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 3: The Artful Brain

Listen to Lecture 3 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese

Listen to Lecture 4 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 5: Neuroscience the new Philosophy

Listen to Lecture 5 | View Lecture Text

[Images above courtesy of the BBC]

Note: Real Player required to play the above.

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As a bonus to the above I would also advice to those who have not seen this to have a look at the following TED talk.

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Again he talks about curious disorders. One that he talks about in the above video, the Capgras Delusion is only one among the many he talks about in the Reith lectures. Other things that he talks about here is the origin of language and synesthesia.

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Now look at the picture below and answer the following question: Which of the two figures is Kiki and which one is Bouba?

If you thought that the one with the jagged shape was Kiki and the one with the rounded one was Bouba then you belong to the majority. The exceptions need not worry.

These experiments were first conducted by the German gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler and were repeated with the names “Kiki” and “Bouba” given to these shapes by VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard. In their experiments, they found a very strong inclination in their subjects to name the jagged shape Kiki and the rounded one Bouba. This happened with about 95-98 percent of the subjects. The experiments were repeated in Tamil speakers and then in babies of about 3 years of age. (who could not write) The results were similar. The only exceptions being in people having autistic disorders where the percentage reduced to only 60.

Dr Ramachandran and Dr Hubbard went on to suggest that this could have implications in our understanding of how language evolved as it suggests that naming of objects is not a random process as held by a number of views but depends on the appearance of the object under consideration. The strong “K” in Kiki had a direct correlation with the jagged shape of that object, thus suggesting a non-arbitrary mapping of objects with the sounds associated with them.

In the above talk and also the lectures, he talks about Synesthesia, a condition wherein the subject associates a color on seeing black and white numbers and letters with each.

His method of studying rare disorders to understand what in the brain does what is very interesting and is giving insights much needed to understand the organ that drives innovation and well, almost everything.

I highly recommend all the above lectures and the video above.

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Peace.

I am a pacifist but i don’t intend to write here about peace directly. I thought of writing about things related to the monumental tragedy of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in a rather indirect way. This is a “Non-Linear” post and is basically in three parts.

I believe August 6 and 9 will remain in human memory for eons for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am an optimist and i don’t think there will be any large nuclear conflict in the medium term future. On the latter date 63 years ago the city of Nagasaki was obliterated, Leaving 80,000 people dead by the end of 1945 (140,000 dead in Hiroshima) and a large number continued to suffer for a much longer time after that.

[The city of Nagasaki before and after the atomic bombings, Source: Wikipedia]

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Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima

One thing that I have always imagined was thinking about how it would be like to be in a city that gets hit by an Atomic (Fission), Thermonuclear or a Neutron Bomb. And let me tell you it is one thing that is almost impossible to imagine. Also then there are a number of things, like your position and what you were looking at. If you are in the inner radius near ground zero, i don’t think there would be any time to react to anything. Seeing the bomb drop and being present at ground zero is even harder to imagine. Now being somewhere far, say 3-4 Kilometers from ground zero, is again really hard to imagine. It is really hard to think what would go in the mind in a short span of a few seconds if you do  get to see the wave approaching and destroying everything on its way for some moments.

My girl once gifted me a few CDs on my birthday (which was a very sweet gift, but let me not digress), and introduced me to a wonderful quote by Aldous Huxley (1931):

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

One of my favorite compositions is “Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima“, it is a masterpeice by Krzysztof Penderecki. When I first heard it, I thought it was rather creepy. However after hearing it a few times, it started growing on me and it is only sometime back that I started marveling  at the intensity of this composition and admiring the depth it had. One afternoon I got into thinking that it was a composition on which no video cover could be made. It was impossible for me to assign any image to that music, which made a video on it impossible. This is somewhat related to the above paragraph where I expressed my inability to imagine what it would be like during a nuclear explosion on my city. And very rightly so, this composition is dedicated to the victims of the twin bombings.

[All copyrights rest with the composer and the producer ]

A black screen in my humble opinion represents best the composition and speaks a thousand words for the dead and the mentally shocked.

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Pale Blue Dot

[Pale Blue Dot: The image of the Earth taken by the Voyager I from a record distance]

Carl Sagan was a wonderful man, an elegant speaker and a man of great learning. I have read almost all books by him and also thoroughly admired and enjoyed the Cosmos television series. One book that I particularly liked was “Pale Blue Dot“, a book based on the photograph by the same name. A photograph taken by the Voyager 1 from a record distance of 6.4 billion Kilometers that shows the Earth as an obscure dot in a beam of scattered sunlight. The video below has Sagan speaking from the book. Having him talk is something else, such is the effect of his voice. I think this is one piece that everyone of us should see once in while!

Such is the beauty of this part that it is worth quoting it:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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The Geeta of J. Robert Oppenheimer

[J. Robert Oppenheimer, Source: Wikipedia]

J. Robert Oppenheimer is probably best known as the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was over-educated in a number of fields other than his forte, that was Physics. He was known for his mathematical acumen, erudition over theoretical physics, knowledge of eastern philosophy and languages particularly Dutch and Sanskrit.

On a personal front, Oppenheimer was emotionally troubled almost all his life often slipping into  depression. He was a chain smoker (which ultimately caused throat cancer and subsequent death) and neglected food for long periods in times of emotional and intellectual discomfort. A lot of his colleagues have said Oppenheimer had a self-destructive tendency, and with his insecurities and melancholy he worried his friends. People associated with him generally fell into two categories, ones who thought he was a silent man of great learning and a brilliant genius, while some thought he was unstable and a pretentious person.

General Leslie Groves was appointed the project director of the Manhattan project and inspite of doubts about Oppenheimer being a possible security risk he made him the scientific director. Many of the generals and people in the defense staff have maintained that inspite of Oppenheimer’s communist inclinations and doubts about his loyalty (that time any communist in America was viewed with suspicion, take for example the rise  of Mc-Carthy as an example of the narrow-mindedness prevalent at the time ), Manhattan project would have never been completed without him. He was so indispensable for the project and for keeping the people from diverse backgrounds working on it together.

[Trinity : The first ever nuclear explosion]

Click to Enlarge

After the end of the great war Oppenheimer became an outspoken critic of the arms race and supported the establishment of an international agency that would have been in control of all the nuclear arsenal. He opposed the development of the Hydrogen bomb initially on technical grounds. Increasingly worried about the danger to humanity from scientific discoveries he lectured on peace till his death, and also joined with Einstein, Bertrand Russell and formed what later became the world academy of art and science in 1960. He had to pay for his outspokeness, for decisions he took that appeared to be plagued with confusion, his leftist leanings and the ire of the politicians that he attracted as a result of his outspoken character after the war in the form of a very publicly humiliating hearing in 1954, which resulted in his security clearance being revoked. For the remainder of his life surprisingly Oppenheimer never showed much resentment for the hearing and it seems he took the humiliation rather gracefully.

In a rare recording in 1965 Oppenheimer was persuaded to quote again the phrase from the Bhagwad Gita  that he claimed crossed his mind when he saw the Trinity explosion.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi armed form and says “now I become death the destroyer of the worlds”. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

In this rare footage, Oppenheimer has tears in his eyes, in what seems to be due to intense guilt and regret.

A lot of people think Oppenheimer was a hypocrite, a moral monster who was instrumental in making  the bomb, for scouting for both the locations over which the bomb was eventually dropped and for supporting the development of the Hydrogen bomb and other devices and that he was a person who was a poser, who lectured on peace but yet supported the bomb and its development and even its use in WW-II.

I think this is unfair on the man, for those who have read stuff on Oppenheimer would know that he had a deep interest in some eastern scriptures, particularly the Bhagwad Geeta. It won’t be wrong to assume that the Geeta had a very marked impact on Oppenheimers thinking and his philosophy on life and duty. The ideas in the Geeta in a way marry the seemingly inherent contradictions that were apparent sometimes in what Oppenheimer spoke about and clear the fog over some of his ideas on peace and support for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and even scouting for a place for bombing.

The Geeta like many other scriptures is subject to interpretations and obviously Oppenheimer’s interpretation is bound to be different. However his knowledge and his interest in the Geeta were enough for him to formulate a code on ethics and life loosely based on the principles of it. Oppenheimer never said in the open what the importance of the Geeta in his life was, but there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that it was indeed very important.

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he was dispirited by the continuation of the development of nuclear weapons and constantly wrestled with moral and ethical problems as he thought he was instrumental in handing over humanity the means of its own possible annihilation. He at this time revisited the Geeta, his old favorite and drew power from it which steadied him in his work and worldview.

Also like i said earlier, the Geeta makes comprehensible some acts of Oppenheimer that were otherwise difficult to grasp for example not only did Oppenheimer build the bomb, he maintained till the end that he did the right thing and yet he always said that he had blood on his hands. Let us try to see that there was no real contradiction in Oppenheimer’s views about peace taking the Bhagwad Geeta as the base. It makes it understandable why a man of such a great persona would become inactive and confused at times and why a man of peace would build the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit at Berkeley in 1933 with Indologist Arthur Ryder and acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita that he had read in the original tongue. Much later in life Oppenheimer was to call the Geeta the most beautiful philosophical discourse in any known tongue. He kept a copy of the Geeta always at hand on his desk and often gifted the Geeta as a gift to many of his colleagues. often his own translation. An indication of the impression that the Geeta had made on him.

The Geeta is the single most important sacred text for the Hindus and is a piller of Hinduism. The importance of the Geeta in Hinduism is perhaps the greatest as compared to the other scriptures. It is essentially on philosophy, ethics, code of conduct and life and is set in midst of the Mahabharata (to be precise the Geeta is from the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata), the longest epic in the world. Things in the Geeta are told in the context of a story of good against evil. The story has a royal family in which all the cousins grow up together but as they grow up to be men they are torn apart due to a quarrel resulting from the royal inheritance. The differences are only resolved by war. Arjuna, the third oldest of the five Pandavas is shown to be a warrior and an archer unparalleled in history.

The geeta begins with Arjuna riding onto the battlefield with lord Krishna, the 8th avatar of Lord Vishnu but on seeing amongst enemy ranks his own friends and relatives, his heart breaks. He is confronted with the prospect of killing his own people and with the fact that if he did not fight it would mean more humiliation for the Pandavas. Depressed by this, he refuses to fight. He is given solace by Krishna, who is being Arjuna’s charioteer.

The geeta has 18 chapters in the course of which Krishna counsels Arjuna on why he should take part in the war. The arguments given are diverse and take care of even the slightest doubts. Inspite of the lengthy nature of his discourse, Krishna’s arguments can be summed up in some very basic points, out of which these seem to have had a major bearing on Oppenheimer’s conduct and view of duty and life :

1. Arjuna is a soldier, his duty is only to fight.

2. Krishna (god or fate) will decide on who lives and who dies, so there is no point in mourning or rejoicing over results. There should be a detachment from the result and one should only focus on the work. “Worry only about the job at hand, don’t worry about what the result would be”.

Oppenheimer’s position was like that of Arjuna before the war. Arjuna was the younger brother of Yudhistra who was more intelligent, a better man than Duryodhana, his cousin who is driven by hate. Duryodhana was so blinded by hate that he tries to kill his cousins, the Pandavas to rule. Krishna’s message to Arjuna was clear. He MUST fight. The message would have been equally clear to Oppenheimer. One other important idea in the Geeta is the idea of duty. Another is of fate, The Geeta espouses that duty and fate should not be mingled together and that one should only focus on his duty and not worry about what is responsibility of others (in his case the politicians and President Truman for example). This and many simple yet profound ideas defined how Oppenheimer acted. He only did his duty as a scientist and as the director, he did what he had to do.

Professor James Hijiya gives a very beautiful commentary of this aspect. I would recommend you to read it (link given below). It is not possible to analyze most of Oppenheimers actions on a blog post. It might need a book. So I would direct all interested to that link. It is short and makes a brisk read for those who get scared by volume. Please read to get the whole point of me mentioning the Geeta of Robert Oppenheimer in this post. I believe that the man who made the atom bomb did not sin. That is my point. And though I greatly admire J. Robert Oppenheimer, that is not the reason why I think that he did not sin, and that he only did his duty.

Recommendations and References:

1. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima – Penderecki

2. Pale Blue Dot– Carl Sagan

3. The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer – James Hijiya. Click Here >>

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