The Journals of Ayn Rand (64 page)

[
Colonel K. D. Nichols served under General Groves, and had responsibility for the design, construction, and operation of the plants which produced the fissionable material required for the bombs
.]

[
The following is AR’s “general outline” of the screenplay
.]

We open with an immense shot of the night sky—the stars and planets—the vast mystery of the universe. Camera tilts to include the earth below—a dark spread of hills, wide and desolate under the sky. A single pinpoint of light shows somewhere in the hills; it looks like a feeble, futile competition to the flaming spread of the stars. Camera moves forward slowly, and we begin to distinguish the figure of a man standing in the hills. He seems helpless and small, totally insignificant in the face of the immensity of the universe.

The man is about thirty years old. He is looking up at the sky. His face is weak and bitter. He turns slowly and walks toward the light we have seen; it is the lighted window of a small, modest house somewhere in the hills of California.

Inside the house, a young woman is lying in bed. The man, her husband, comes in. He speaks bitterly of the fact that man is only a worm in the universe—a helpless, insignificant worm—and what is the use of anything? The young wife reproaches him gently—that is no way to talk on the day when their son was born. And we see the new-born child beside her.

The young mother is full of hopes and dreams for her son. She expects him to have a great life in a great new world; the war has just ended, there will never be another war. She asks her husband what important events took place on the day of her son’s birth. The father picks up a newspaper—it is the year 1919. He glances through the pages, briefly naming the big events of the day. Somewhere at the bottom of a page, he finds a small item announcing that Sir Ernest Rutherford, British scientist, has succeeded in smashing an atom of nitrogen. He drops the paper contemptuously; he does not consider this of any importance; scientists, he says, are useless; this is the day of the practical man, the man of action.

There is a photograph of Rutherford in the paper. From it we dissolve to Rutherford himself, in his laboratory in England. He is being interviewed by a couple of reporters—it is not considered a big story—the reporters are not too impressed. Yes, Rutherford says, he can explain his experiments so that the laymen would understand—he is not sure, however, that it would interest many people. He proceeds to explain briefly the nuclear theory of the atom, which he had formulated in 1912, and his present experiment by which he transmuted nitrogen into hydrogen. Of what practical use is that?—asks one of the reporters. A little astonished, Rutherford, the theoretical scientist, answers: “I don’t know.” “Then why are you interested in that kind of research?” Rutherford answers, very quietly: “Only because it is knowledge of the truth.”

We dissolve to the young father saying: “What is the truth? There is no such thing as objective truth.” He is saying it to his son, now ten years old. It is the year 1929. The boy is an earnest, intelligent child; his face shows future strength and character. (For the purpose of this outline only we’ll call him John X—he can be anyone, he is the young generation of today.) The father is reproaching him for his scholarly inclinations—the boy studies too much, reads too much, asks too many questions. The father wants him to go out more, learn more about the world and become useful when he grows up; people who think are useless; the mind is a superstition, truth is a superstition, everything is relative, we mustn’t question anything, we must learn to take orders. The father is a kind of petty-Fascist type, a shiftless failure who wants to run everything and does nothing, who takes out his own incompetence in hatred for the world; he represents the cheap cynicism, the irrationalism, the contempt for moral standards and intellectual principles which characterized his generation all over the world.

Tied into this scene we show, with brief explanations, a scene of Dr. E. O. Lawrence, at the University of California, with his new invention—the cyclotron; and a scene of Dr. Robert J. Van de Graaf, at Princeton, with his new giant electrostatic generator—two important points in the progress of atomic science.

Then, as the father complains about the state of the world—there is nothing to do now, after the stock market crash, no frontiers left to conquer—we go to a plane flying over the desolate wastes of North Canada. Gilbert Labine discovers the black rock on the shore of a lake. We show his expedition through the snow the next year, the discovery that the rock is pitchblende [uranium ore], the establishment of his company.

1932.
John X is 13 years old. He shows signs of becoming nervous, restless, bitter—as he studies in secret from his father. He has to smuggle the latest scientific magazines into his room and hide them. In connection with his studies, we show scenes of: the Cockron-Walton experiments, in England, splitting atoms with protons; Sir James Chadwick, in England, discovering the neutron; Prof. Harold Urey, in America, discovering heavy water.

1934.
Niels Bohr, in Denmark, formulates his theory of the structure of the [atomic nucleus].

Enrico Fermi, in Italy, invents the technique of bombarding an atom with slow neutrons.

Scene of Fermi’s clash with Fascist officials who hamper his work. (I would like to have information from Fermi about an authentic incident—also the exact date and manner of his escape from Italy.)

John X is now fifteen. There is a violent scene when he tells his father that he wants to become a scientist. Scientists, the father declares, are no good, because they “live in ivory towers.” Man must act, not think. His son must learn to be practical; take, for instance, that fellow who’s growing so powerful in Germany; of course, the father says, I don’t approve of some of his ideas, but nobody will deny that he’s
practical
, a realist, a smart man with an efficient system who’ll get what he wants. As an illustration of how one goes about being practical, the father seizes the boy’s books and throws them into the fireplace.

As the books burn, we dissolve to a huge pile of books burning in the square of a German city, under swastika flags. And we see the “practical man,” Hitler, in his office, bending over a map of Germany. He tells his assistants that he controls all of it—he boasts about his power—to hell with principles and theories—thinking is a weakness—the brain is evil—action and force are all that counts—a powerful State can accomplish anything—the individual doesn’t matter—the mind doesn’t matter (exact quotations from
Mein Kampf
to be used here). Camera pans to the window of the office: there is a light in a distant window of the dark city outside. Camera moves toward that window and into the room. It is a modest study. A solitary man sits working at a desk. The desk holds nothing but books, papers, abstract formulas. The man is Einstein.