ohmazgosh:

stillwaitingformagic:

ohmazgosh:

all-the-worlds-a-stag:

tanoraqui:

swingsetindecember:

january-summers:

swingsetindecember:

in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude

eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancy looking

 i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought 

every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?

Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?

Not to get all serious on this delightful post, but it just occurred to me that the US government kept scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the dark about what they were working on because if they knew they were building an actual doomsday device, they ABSOLUTELY would have either sabotaged it or quit. Turns out real life villains are more cunning and real life scientists are more upstanding than in fiction.

I thought the Manhattan project was just a marvel thing????

Nope! I’m not sure how the Manhattan Project is portrayed in the Marvel movies (although now I’m curious to see how they might have spun it), but the Manhattan Project was the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s. And the vast majority of people working on it had no clue what they were building.

I think part of it really was that if people knew what they were building, they would have quit, but the secrecy also had a lot to do with keeping American military secrets from reaching The Enemy. You know, this kind of stuff: 

According to Wikipedia, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.“ When scientists started to figure out what they were building, they were told they’re making a “gadget”. *insert eyeroll*

When the scientists and workers who built the bombs turned on the radio and heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instantly knew what they had been working on. Imagine, the sudden realization that you played a hand in the deaths of 200,000 people. You’re a scientist; you’re supposed to make the world a better, more enlightened place, not dole out death and devastation.

But scientists, being humanists, continued to try to mitigate the damage of the bomb after finding out what it really was: 

• Some who had realized how dangerous it could be before the bombs were launched tried to persuade the president or the military that it was unnecessary to have to actually launch the bombs.  
• After the bombings, The Pugwash Conferences were established to try to outlaw the use of atomic weapons globally.
• Oppenheimer, the physicist who was the lab director at Los Alamos and literal “father of the atomic bomb”, went on to lobby for international arms control (and was later accused of being a Communist and stripped of his security clearance).

This article has some really great info about how the scientists working on the bomb reacted when they found out what it was: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/07/manhattan-project-scientists-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-column/3305404001/?fbclid=IwAR0VY4iVjtqf7mBYj3KCJ5dKCMqU9AuHEUDRNDIzEPrXR7ftxEwRz1X6D7s

TL;DR Basically, in real life, scientists will not want to work on your villainous death device unless they literally don’t know what they’re working on, and when they figure it out, they will try to convince the villain not to use the death device, and when the villain inevitably uses the death device, they will continue to try to do damage control. And this, kids, is why you never accept a job working for the US Military.