Sheldon Lee Glashow Quotes
I think that I got committed to physics at the age of - oh, it must have been 1942 - ten, when most countries were at war and children were interested in airplanes and bombs and such things.
Glashow, Sheldon Lee. Interview. NOVA: The Elegant Universe, PBS, 2003.
The “Cliveden Set” {598323} was in favor of the policy of appeasement. The name came from the seat of Lord and Lady Astor, who were both supporters of the policy. The policy of appeasement was later seen as a big mistake because it prevented early Allied involvement in World War II and therefore gave Hitler time to buildup the German military while invading much of Eastern Europe.
Each day the German Airforce was sending air assaults over England. The English defenders were shooting down 2 Germans for every English plane lost. The British however were running out of pilots. Both sides were terribly weakened. However it was the Germans who cracked and called off the air assault prelude to the planned invasion of England.
At this point, the horrors of the German concentration death camps were generally known by the world press. This quotation shows the denial that the Irish Free State was in about the German Nazi atrocities. The 6-county Nationalsits were the Irish counties in Northern Ireland that did not join the Irish Free State and so far as the Catholic Irish were concerned, the Catholics of Northern Ireland were a persecuted minority undergoing oppression and that was not they believed morally different from the murders of millions of Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people in Europe. If the Free State Irish publicly admitted the difference, they would morally have had to join the allies and De Valera was totally opposed to that. Over 70,000 Irishmen and women rejected the moral stand of their government, and volunteered for the British Army to the great distress of the Free State leaders like De Valera. See {639722} for his personal denial of reality.
At first reading, this is just a common report of a German war correspondent riding along on a bombing mission. However what makes it a very important historical quotation is the description of the fires and the date. In WWII the allies firebombed Hamburg {624722} and Dresden, and were then accused by the Germans—and by some historical revisionists in the 21st century—of bombing civilian cities and using the firbombing technique where one huge conflagrant sucked the air out of the area and roasted even people in bomb shelters. However, it was clear that the Germans had started the bombing of civilian cities, but the firebombing was less clear. This quotation proves that it was the Germans who first broke the rules of war and that made the subsequent Allied use of the technique legal and for most people then moral.
Unusually for a scientist, Szilard was politically very astute. In this letter he predicted exactly what was going to happen in Europe which would be WWII. He was the leading scientist organizing the lobbying efforts with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to develop an atomic bomb.
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
