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Introduction: Beyond True And False, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

It seems fitting to follow Murray Gell-Mann’s Foreword with a story involving two other illustrious physicists. During the 1940s, Leó Szilárd—who discovered the nuclear chain reaction—decided to keep a diary of his work on the Manhattan Project. He told Hans Bethe, one of his colleagues on the project, that he didn’t intend to publish the diary, but only “to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don't you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” Szilárd responded, “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”