"The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Physicists Have Known Sin And
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
About this quote
J. Robert Oppenheimer delivered this as the Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at MIT on 25 November 1947 — two years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was speaking to an audience of engineers and scientists about the new moral weight that physicists carried after the Manhattan Project. The lecture, titled "Physics in the Contemporary World," marked a shift in Oppenheimer's public role from laboratory director to moral voice on nuclear responsibility.
Source
Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture, MIT, 1947