the adventures of pinkaholic girl

Phil and Cal Reunion

Met up with Cally and Phil tonight for a bit of a reunion, which was quite fun! those kids have spent the last three months travelling around the mediterranean and aren't at all sick of the travelling, which I heartily admire. We spent a few hours at the Elbow Room in Angel, which is a pool bar that lets you hire the tables by the hour. Had some very average food for dinner, except their "fat boy" chips which are hand cut chunky chips that are TWICE fried. Mmmm....

Was kind of cool catching up with a few different people that I don't see very often, like Mendel and Tim - who's always full of odd conversational pieces like "it takes 8 minutes for light to get to earth from the surface of the sun. How long does it take to get from the sun's core to the surface?" The answer is apparently 200,000 years because of the sheer density of stuff that is around the sun at this point in time and the frantic pace at which these reactions are happening all the time.

We also had an interesting discussion about nuclear bombs, and the ethical question of if you were Einstein, how would you be feeling right now having to live with the fact that you invented a technology that was so destructive? (as he must have been doing?) And at this point I learned something that I didn't know before - that the scientist who was working on the same thing for the Germans, a Nobel prize winner - apparently made an error in the formula calculations he used in their bombs, which made them ineffective. The question is whether or not the error was a mistake, or on purpose? And if you were in the same situation, what would you do? THe history goes that this scientist (whose name I don't remember) had a meeting with a Danish counterpart, Bohr, during the war and there is a lot of speculation surrounding this meeting. The danish scientist believed that the Nobel scientist was asking about it because he genuinely didn't know about the error, but I think many people are supposed to have believed that this scientist would have known the answer, and made the error on purpose to stop the Germans.

It also reminded me of the recent anniversary of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how the crew of the Enola Gay didn't regret what they did at all. I think it would be nice to have that level of unshakeable faith in *anything* that you've ever done, because I certainly know that I don't. I think there would be plenty of events and circumstances in my life that would make me re-think decisions I'd made and their effect on others. Or, mroe accurately, anything that affected myself only I could happily deal with and move on with my life, but if I made any decision with such a wide-spread magnitude and the level of destruction as a nuclear bomb I think it would haunt me forever. I'm not sure how you would move on with your life unless you had some kind of inner faith that what you were doing is completely right. Which Tim, at dinner, offhandedly commented something along the lines of "yeah, you would do anything in wartime". It makes me realise how different society is these days - no limits, no threats, nothing to worry about on any great magnitude. Just the need to keep one's mind busy.

posted by d @ 11:57 pm