Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Book Reports live with lightning live with lightning The main hero of the novel is looking for an answer to the question: “What is his place as a scientist in the world.” The book focuses on the historic period from the 30s till the end of the World War II. A common American post-student wants to become a scientist. He has nothing except his talent, courage, patience, persistence, and strong will to devote his life to physics. On obtaining his diploma and his appointment as an assistant and teacher in the University of Columbia, he spent his summer washing dishes, working at a gas station in a place with a significant name High Hope. He found by chance that he had taken the job from a man who had a family to support. Eric Gorin moved on. When asked whether he is especially interested in any particular field of physics, Eric frankly answered that he didn’t know enough about any of them yet. One of Eric’s professors Hollingworth is very kind to him, but physics is only a career, his way of making money. Eric was going to teach freshman physics lab and take his own courses towards his doctorate as well. “You’ll probably find the first year rather confusing and hard work to teach between the two schedules, but things will straighten out for you after a while. “ – indifferently notices Earle Fox, department chairman. Eric is proud of talking to the Nobel Price winner, such a prominent figure in science But Earle Fox is a good artist. No one could guess how empty and unhappy his life is, the life of a skeptic and pessimist, the life of stereotype and standard. He never cared for the work, never put even a spark of passion into it. No soul there could be in the pure, abstract science. The men Fox saw had a fine and delicate intelligence, but the society which had reared them, had also told them that they were working in fields that were foreign to mainstreams of ordinary endeavor. The knew the verdict pronounced on them was the opposite of justice, they had made themselves willing to believe that science which they found most interesting in life had no connection with life. They found the peace, which made work possible. So that from disenchantment with the science, he had progressed to contempt for its practitioners and to a still profounder contempt to what he did. Earl Fox is the first symbolic impediment for Eric. He asked Gorin what made a young man choose of all professions one in research physics. This is a question Fox could never answer. Eric is in the very strength of his life, he agreed to the arguments that there was really no fame in science, no money, and not too much happiness in terms what life has to offer. But still Eric did not comprehend and even misunderstood Earle Fox. He understood these words later, when he had gone through a lot of challenges in his life, but he found a positive answer on that question. Gorin has keys from the library, the laboratory and the assistants’ office. But nobody helps or assists him in choosing books, finding out how the apparatus works. All he encounters is indifference, impassiveness, and exhaustion. But G. is persistent and wants a “crucial experience” in physics. His providence and obstinacy soon link his future career to Tony Haviland, a good hard worker for a short period of time. Tony is more interested in fashion and money, science and success in his research is only an ambitious game. He is able to leave and go to the coast closing the laboratory and putting aside an extremely important experiment, which may influence his assistance’s future career and life. When atomic physics knowledge was very well assessed on the market Tony sold his mind to the military men without thinking of it from the aesthetical point of view. Gorin fights apathy, hypocrisy in Cumberland. But all his original ideas are scrapped, and the research is cancelled. Clark Regan, a cynic, conventional man, who thought that a war was the only time a physicist could make a go of it, made Gorin and his colleagues feel like rabbits hypnotized by a snake. Gorin’s work lost all savor for him. He felt deeply guilty about this inner inertia and at the same time, he was furious with a world that made research trivial. His work was his life; and to be so paralyzed within and without made him an irascible, diffusely angry man. Thus Gorin finds himself in a new daydream trap. He wants to support his family and to be independent. He does not want to be hypnotized by the lie that pure research is fine and wonderful. He doesn’t want to become earl Fox. Gorin says that most of the problems you work on in industry can’t be as interesting as the academic problems, but at least the conditions of work in industry are more honest. But he is predestined to disillusionment. Mr. Turnbull, his new boss an obese man fools around with Gorin. Gorin is hired to find simpler and cheaper methods for production in the machine building. He is given a “physicist dream”. But his elation contentment with work lasted not for a long time. He is locked away from the results of his research by the it’s – my- money-do-as-you’re-told voice. The years of war changed everything all over the world. Eric worked on atomic energy research. As a scientist, he asked himself a question whether he loathed the political use of atomic bombs. When he saw the death of Fox, his manner of dying, the manner of living, he understood the terrible truth, that he was a man before he was a scientist, and that at the final moment he would die as a man, nothing more and nothing less. He didn’t want to indulge himself anymore; it was time for him to start living-at any price. He was in San Francisco at the time the bomb went off. He wanted to arrange the world in which such a bomb didn’t make any difference. At the time Americans were gloriously sure that they were going to make the grade as a civilization. The millennium was at hand. But the hopes were destroyed; atomic energy was used as a threat, open or implied to frighten other countries. He preferred painful, distressing truth to a peace-giving lie. He chose his way, and understood that every lab in the country was under pressure buy the military men and the people who had deliberately confused the bomb with atomic energy. He says: “ I’m not going to be any Earl Fox. No student will hear me say, “ What difference does it make?” Everything makes a difference now. Indifference is condemnation of the human race said Febermaher. Indifference is innocence sinister, which makes the minds and souls deliberately atrophied. When Americans asked, with horror, “ How could the Germans be made to believe such things?” Febermaher was tempted to reply, “ What makes Americans think that they would be any different”. Indifference is the bovine stupidity with which a herd of cows watch one of their own number being slaughter. And this sinister innocence is the ultimate cruelty of the universal kind. In America it is called cruelty, in Europe, the other side of the coin was called practicality. Bibliography: Word Count: 1234
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