100 YEARS AGO

The San Francisco correspondent of the Daily Mail reports that the people of Santa Barbara, a county of southern California, are terror-stricken owing to the increasing frequency and severity of the earthquake shocks, of which there were seventy-five from July 27–31. The most destructive was that at the town of Los Alamos, at 1.20 a.m. on July 31. All the brick buildings were thrown to the ground, but the frame buildings generally escaped serious injury except to their windows... The shock lasted thirty seconds, and seems to have had a spiral motion. Goods were hurled from the shelves of the stores and piled in the middle of the rooms; even heavy desks were tossed about. The inhabitants ran into the streets in a panic, for in the morning between 7.25 and 7.30 there were additional shocks, and just before nine two more. ... The earth continues to tremble at intervals, and the countryside is said to be changing appearance.

From Nature 7 August 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

Dr. Conant points out that we are now dealing with the consequences of a new social phenomenon. Until the advent of nuclear weapons, developments in defensive or offensive weapons depended on the special application of the publicly known facts and principles of physics and chemistry. Any new scientific knowledge involved had no revolutionary consequences for the advance of science. The flowering of the whole field of nuclear physics, on the contrary, depended on the expenditure of a large sum of public money, justified in the first instance in terms of the destructive power of a weapon required in a desperate global struggle. Inevitably nuclear physics, thus born of a war-time necessity, was marked from its birth with the secrecy which was anathema to nineteenth-century men of science. The advance of one whole area of science was thus equated with national security; and Dr. Conant insists that the assumption that science knows no frontier is automatically cancelled and we must face the consequences. We must distinguish sharply between the special position of nuclear science and that of the other fields of physics and chemistry. This is the first step towards preventing the spread of undue secrecy and thereby assisting the progress of science and promoting the welfare of the international community of science.

From Nature 9 August 1952.