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- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!mailer.cc.fsu.edu!sun13!ds8.scri.fsu.edu!jac
- From: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
- Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
- Subject: Re: Social responsibility?
- Message-ID: <10046@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
- Date: 31 Jul 92 14:52:59 GMT
- References: <9207290006.AA08478@sleepy.network.com> <weS3tmL0BwwJQ231Np@transarc.com> <1992Jul31.061546.29620@ns.network.com>
- Sender: news@sun13.scri.fsu.edu
- Reply-To: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
- Organization: SCRI, Florida State University
- Lines: 30
-
- In article <1992Jul31.061546.29620@ns.network.com> logajan@ns.network.com (John Logajan) writes:
- >Bob_Sidebotham@transarc.com writes:
- >>What happens to society under this scenario? Do researchers have a
- >>responsibility to evaluate the destructive possibilities inherent in
- >>their work *before* publishing?
- >
- >There are some things that cannot be kept secret, no matter how important
- >it is to keep them secret. The very act of govenrments trying to now clamp
- >down on CF research would be taken as an obvious signal that something
- >powerful is to be discovered. ....
-
- I think the point was for the researchers to keep it secret, from the
- governments as well. This was the approach taken by fission researchers
- prior to WWII (concerning the number of neutrons released in the fission
- of U-235) up to the point when Joliot and Curie published their findings
- on the subject -- to the horror of others who had seen same and suppressed it.
-
- Of course, the "secret" is still out there for anyone else who looks....
-
- >When P+F went public, the genie was out of the bottle. There is no way to get
- >the genie back into the bottle. If there is something to CF, there simply is
- >no way of preventing that discovery from now being made.
-
- This is true. Who you tell about it is another matter.
-
- --
- J. A. Carr | "The New Frontier of which I
- jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu | speak is not a set of promises
- Florida State University B-186 | -- it is a set of challenges."
- Supercomputer Computations Research Institute | John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)
-