Preserve the Capacity to Not Act

Abstract

Abstract This chapter delves into the responsibility borne by nuclear physicists, through Sciascia’s The Mystery of Majorana. Standing midway between investigative writing and secular hagiography, The Mystery of Majorana idealizes its protagonist—a brilliant physicist in Enrico Fermi’s research group who disappeared mysteriously, leaving behind him a trail of contradictory clues—to the point of whitewashing him. According to Sciascia, the only possible reason for Majorana’s disappearance is that he foresaw the destruction portended by the atomic bomb. His withdrawal from the world is the radical act of a saint who renounces everything in order to prevent the bomb from being built and ensure humanity’s survival. In telling Majorana’s story, Sciascia fashions a moral allegory that spurs the reader to meditate on the concept of complicity. His objective is also to condemn Italian physics for its responsibility in developing nuclear technology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.