I adore Ron Hassner’s response to the question, What advice do you have for those who still don’t know what they’ll be doing after graduation?

Remember that kid from 2nd grade who kept saying that he wanted to be a dentist and today he’s… a dentist? Those people scare me. You probably haven’t made up your mind yet because you have the courage required for delaying the decision until you’ve explored all of your options. Good for you. Take your time. Try out different jobs, locations, lifestyles. Of course you have to work to pay for food and rent. Work hard. But you don’t have to commit yourself to a career quite yet.

Those people also scare me!

What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you were graduating? [Daily Cal]

Robert Reich, Goldman School of Public Policy: That the real test wasn’t whether I’d succeed or fail — I failed again and again — but my resilience in bouncing back from failure.

Terry Johnson, Department of Bioengineering: Choosing what to do next seems momentous, but it will not define you, your career, or your life.

Ron Hassner, Department of Political Science: The truth about time travel and bayonets. Those who’ve taken PS124 (“War!”) know this. If you ever get your hands on a time machine, and you use it to travel back in time, and you step out of the machine, and you’re in the middle of a war, and people are fighting with bayonets… you get right back into that time machine. You hear me? Just do it! Don’t argue with me. I teach PS124, I know that I’m talking about.

Ron Hassner with the best advice.

Reasonable men can dream monstrous dreams. It is the lesson of the 20th century: a lesson articulated from various perspectives since Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment amid the wreckage of World War Two. Defenders of the Enlightenment can cogently argue (and many have) that Nazi science was a grotesque caricature, that the Holocaust was a betrayal of the Enlightenment rather than a fulfilment of its fatal dialectic. But it is harder to make that case with respect to the development of nuclear weapons. Indeed the subject seems designed to lay bare the contradictions at the core of Enlightenment culture by revealing them at work in the subculture of professional physicists bent to the needs of government power. Few social laboratories could more clearly reveal the tensions between chauvinist impulses and humanist aspirations, or between careerist plotting and disinterested service, or – perhaps most important – between the Enlightenment ideal of intellectual openness and the demands for secrecy made by the national security state.

The history of nuclear weapons began in an atmosphere of creative ferment and international trade in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others created the foundations of quantum physics. Yet within less than a decade this moment had passed. Olympian conversations were drowned out by fascist chants. Jewish physicists, led by Einstein, fled to America; Heisenberg stayed in Germany; Bohr stayed out of sight in occupied Denmark. The concentration of research effort shifted westwards across the Atlantic. But it was research with a new, pragmatic mission: to build an atomic bomb before Hitler did. Theories conceived in open exchange were harnessed to secret purposes, and illuminating ideas were pressed into the service of mass death. No wonder some of the atomic scientists felt remorse, or at least ambivalence, about their achievement; no wonder some began to glimpse the darker dimensions of Enlightenment when the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain

Oh God, what have we done? by Jackson Lears [London Review of Books]

The campus I currently study at has a street named after J. Robert Oppenheimer,

Granted that alongside Ernest Orlando Lawrence he built the damn American school of physics on this campus, but I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating given the conflict presented in the text above.

I also love Hans Bethe’s quote that Oppenheimer ‘worked at physics mainly because he found physics the best way to do philosophy.’ And I think that many on this campus, and elsewhere, still believe this to be true of themselves because of figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Although Philosophy of Physics is still pretty cool.