ABSTRACT
In e Enchantment of Modern Life, Jane Bennett cites the creation of Robo-pets that mimic the behaviours of real dogs as a minor instance of modern wonder. The scientist in Kyoto who created the artificial animals, it turns out, is troubled by them. ‘I’ve been reading about the people who built the atomic bombs, because I profoundly identify with them’, he tells a journalist. ‘They knew what they were doing and where it would lead’, he continues, ‘and I worry about where this will lead’.1 Bennett passes over this remark without comment, but the analogy with atomic scientists is interesting, and unnerving, not only because of the catastrophic uses to which their invention was put, but also because of the scientists’ similar recourse to language of enchantment and wonder, and their reliance on religious and mythological narratives in accounting for their creation. Following the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, on 16 July 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously likened his role in the bomb project to that of a world-destroying Hindu god, and later to Prometheus, the bringer of fire. He also alluded to the scientists’ state of innocence, and their subsequent acquisition of sinful knowledge.2 In fact, as one atomic historian notes, many of the scientists who were present for the bomb’s detonation, even those ‘ordinarily without religious faith or even any inclination thereto, recounted their experiences in words derived from the linguistic fields of myth and theology’.3
