Watch Iranian star filmmaker Jafar Panahi with @jonstewart in one of the most moving conversations on the power of art and resistance, even from jail.
Panahi is promoting his Oscar-nominated film, "It Was Just an Accident".
https://t.co/F5hCwMepfP
CBS reports on the reactions of the Iranian people: "It's not 'death to Israel' and 'death to America.' It's 'thank you' and 'a new day dawning'... It's the Iranian people that have been telling me over and over and over again, 'We want this.'"
Mr. President @POTUS: Look out your window. Look at Lafayette Park. Look at the four corners. You’ll see Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kościuszko, and von Steuben, two Frenchmen, one Polish patriot, and one Prussian officer. Foreign commanders whose countries helped George Washington and a ragtag revolutionary army defeat the most powerful empire on earth.
That is the American origin story. A revolution against tyranny that survived because others stepped in to help. There was no shame in it then, and there is no shame in it now.
Now look to the center of the park. You’ll see Andrew Jackson, not President Jackson, but General Jackson, the man who fought the British at New Orleans. Yet even with that victory, America still lost the War of 1812. The White House was burned. The republic nearly collapsed. This young country almost disappeared because no one came to its aid when it stood alone.
When the Iranian regime says it wants to “negotiate,” that is not diplomacy, it is delay. Authoritarian regimes negotiate to buy time, to regroup, to identify protesters, and to finish the job. If this regime survives, what follows will not be stability, it will be a bloodbath that locks their power in permanently.
America has never been neutral in the great moral struggles of history. Europe after World War II, large parts of Asia freed from imperialism and totalitarianism, Kuwait liberated from invasion, genocide confronted in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yes, mistakes were made. But Iran is different. This is a people openly demanding regime change, under live fire, in real time.
You have a historic opportunity. If you give the Iranian people hope and then legitimize their executioners through deals and hesitation, history will not forgive it.
Look at Lafayette Park. America knows what happens when free people are abandoned, and it knows what happens when allies step forward at the decisive moment.
If you claim to support human rights yet can’t bring yourself to show solidarity with those fighting for their liberty in Iran, you’ve revealed yourself. You don’t give a damn about people being oppressed and brutalised so long as it’s being done by the enemies of your enemies.
BREAKING: Sugars essential for life have been found in pristine asteroid Bennu samples collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Combined with previous detections of amino acids and nucleobases, we see that life’s ingredients were widespread throughout the solar system: https://t.co/Tb3HpwZG9J
More on the study led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of @TohokuUniPR⤵️
"Ptolemy made a universe which lasted 1,400 years. Newton also made a universe, which has lasted 300 years. Einstein has made a universe and I can’t tell you how long that will last.”
- George Bernard Shaw pays tribute to Albert Einstein #OTD in 1930.
#NobelPrize
J. Robert Oppenheimer's Recommendation Letter for Richard Feynman (1943)✍️
Dear Professor Birge,
In these war times it is not always easy to think constructively about the peace that is to follow, even in such relatively small things as the welfare of our department. I would like to make one suggestion to you which concerns that, and about which I have myself a very sure and strong conviction.
As you know, we have quite a number of physicists here, and I have run into a few who are young and whose qualities I had not known before. Of these there is one who is in every way so outstanding and so clearly recognized as such, that I think it appropriate to call his name to your attention, with the urgent request that you consider him for a position in the department at the earliest time that that is possible.
You may remember the name because he once applied for a fellowship in Berkeley: it is Richard Feynman. He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony.
The reason for telling you about him now is that his excellence is so well known, both at Princeton where he worked before he came here, and to a not inconsiderable number of “big shots” on this project, that he has already been offered a position for the post war period, and will most certainly be offered others. I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects.
I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and Wigner said, “He is a second Dirac, only this time human.”
Of course, there are several people here whose recommendation you might want; in the first instance Professors Brode and McMillan. I hope you will not mind my calling this matter to your attention, but I feel that if we can follow the suggestion I have made, all of us will be very happy and proud about it in the future. I cannot too strongly emphasize Feynman’s remarkable personal qualities which have been generally recognized by officers, scientists and laity in this community.
With every good wish,
Robert Oppenheimer
Read more 📄: https://t.co/JcAA9bJZ4o
📷 Feynman: Caltech Archives
Congratulations to John Clarke, Michael Devoret, & John Martinis
@NobelPrize in Physics "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling & energy quantization in an electric circuit" in 3 PRLs
https://t.co/ZJWyJB8ta4
https://t.co/rYlODViEZR
https://t.co/M7tyw1KFzD