Nothing really came of this or the two subsequent letters from Ein-stein early in 1940. Roo-sevelt, warning him of the real likelihood of uranium being used to create an entirely new type of bomb, the need for particular vigilance over German activities in this regard, and suggesting immediate gov-ernment action to coordinate scientific research in nuclear physics. By August 1939 Albert Einstein was induced by Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner to write directly to his personal friend, President F. The theoretical possibilities of producing nuclear fission from cer-tain elements, such as uranium, travelling at tremendous speed were long entertained by nuclear physicists throughout the world. Albert the Great was proclaimed Patron of natural scientists at the very con-ception of the atomic age, a phrase that had no meaning whatever to most people until 6 August 1945. But he was also fully aware of what the whole scientific community already knew to be a certainty, namely that an atomic bomb, the like of which had never been seen, could in fact be produced. Albert the Great "forever the PATRON before God of students of the natural sciences with the supplemental privileges and honours which belong, of its nature, to this heavenly patronage," he may very well have been inspired by divine providence. When on 16 December 1941 Pope Pius xn proclaimed St. To appreciate his concern with natural science requires that we remember what he held to be superior to the scientific effort that consumed so much of his energy.ĭid Albertus Magnus know or foreseen Alchemical with Sciences he knew of maybe were or were going to be apart of the chemical make up of the Atomic/Nuclear Bomb in his medieval age ? Let us say it with candor: he did not locate scien-tific investigation of the natural world at the summit of intellectual endeavor. If the scientific story ought to be told, it is not the whole story.Īlbert was both a many-sided scholar and one who had a highly developed sense of hierarchy a grasp of each aspect of his scholar-ship demands that it be put into the context of his total work and that we know how Albert himself assessed each major segment of his multiform activity. Indeed, one of Albert's major themes was the necessity to discrimi-nate between the merely superstitious and legitimate scientific inter-est, a discrimination that would inhibit summary condemnations. " My Master (the Lord Albert, sometime bishop of Ratisbon, a man so god-like, divinus, in all science that he could be called with propriety "the marvel and the miracle of our time," experienced too in the magical arts on which knowledge of this material greatly depends) thought differently from all the aforesaid."Įven today bookshops given to the occult may stock on occasion an "Albertus Magnus Dreambook," yet another good reason for wel-coming this serious appraisal of a sober thirteenth-century figure who did pioneer work in a whole range of scientific disciplines. Such was surely the benign meaning intended by his respectable stu-dent, Ulrich of Strasburg, OP, who recorded one of Albert's frequent dissents from the views of predecessors along with the qualities that gave weight to his master's opinion: Albert's investigations of the properties and interaction of natural items - stars and stones, minerals and herbs - to say nothing of his mathematics, astrology, and alchemy, earned him a reputation, if not as a wizard, at least as a "magician" who, in medieval terminology, might be nothing more sinister than a practitioner of applied science.
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