Newspaper Article

AFTER THE BOMB, A MUSHROOM CLOUD OF METAPHORS

test., JAMES GLEICK, James Gleick, the author of ''Chaos: Making a New Science,'' is writing a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman, who witnessed the first atomic bomb

1989

Overview

Describe the quality of the light, the famous light brighter than a thousand suns. Was it ''almost colorless and shapeless''? ''A stupendous burst of fierce light''? Would you call it ''a light not of this world''? Was it more like ''a ghastly pulsating radiance''? Was it, by any chance, the kind of thing where ''the night turned into day''? Was it green, pink, red, scarlet, purple, ethereal purple, violet, gold, yellow, yellow-white, white, multicolored or all of the above? A story told many times becomes a myth, of course, and Trinity is our myth, the one that explains the age's anxiety about the human future or our reckless, short-term approach to life. In the instant of that blast, humans became fantastically powerful and fantastically vulnerable. For a time, the scientists were treated like gods - and as Jay Cantor has a fictionalized [J. Robert Oppenheimer] write in his 1988 novel, ''Krazy Kat,'' ''Gods are a luxury we can't afford in the atomic age.'' Oppenheimer himself, in a speech soon after Trinity, chose Prometheus, the fire-bringer, as the proper symbol. As befits any mythic hero, Mr. Cantor's Oppenheimer is both larger and darker than life. ''Krazy,'' he writes, ''I think you can imagine the blackness that has grown inside me since the day you first saw me at Alamogordo. That sadness fills my limbs with dark heavy blood, keeps me from acting in the world to make right what I did.'' Readers of the myth, in all its versions, are like children hearing the same bedtime story for the hundredth time, refusing to allow the omission of familiar details: the porkpie hat, the tower against the sky. Don't forget that they called it ''the gadget.'' Don't forget that they worried about setting the whole atmosphere afire. (''Anna side bet Oppie,'' says Mr. Cantor's stand-in for Enrico Fermi, ''onna whether ahr leetle gadgeet wella egnite the earth's etmosphere.'') Don't forget that they fused the desert floor to a green glass.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: ATOMIC WEAPONS / BOOKS AND LITERATURE / Cantor, Jay / FEYNMAN, RICHARD / GLEICK, JAMES / Oppenheimer, J Robert / Peierls, Rudolf / Regis, Ed / Rhodes, Richard