While it is easy—and devastatingly common—for physicists to dismiss our everyday “fundamental science” lab work as an ethereal, theoretical, and purely apolitical study, it is impossible to ignore the historical and, yes, political applications of our work. To be a graduate student in the physics department at Columbia University is to know that Pupin Hall—the very building in which we teach, study, and conduct research—is the same Pupin Hall in which the first nuclear weapons were developed. To know this history, however, is not to understand the implications of such a history.

In the eyes of the Columbia physics department, scientific accomplishment is divorced from historical consequence. On a page devoted to the Manhattan project on the department’s website, “history” is reduced to a list of scientific milestones and a litany of academic titans who have advanced the limits of intellectual progress, all neatly hyperlinked to the appropriate references, landmark filings, press releases, and Wikipedia pages. Below this lengthy paragraph, in merely two sentences, a 2017 visit to campus from one of the last survivors of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion is summarized in the words of a Columbia professor. No hyperlinks exist to further document this event. (Nor are there photographs, references, or even quotes from the survivor, Shigeaki Mori, himself.)

Of course, this erasure of historical consequences is not unique to the Columbia University physics department, or even the field of physics as a whole. However, as philosopher George Santayana writes in the first volume of his five-part book The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While my department seeks to immortalize a romanticized and sanitized sequence of events, it fails to acknowledge the deeply traumatic history it helped to create, the consequences of which I believe are not only ignorant but also incredibly dangerous if we seek to avoid repeating a history of catastrophic weapons development and utilization.

The critical questions for scientists of my generation now pertain to how we can grapple with our role both as scientists and as political advocates for the applications of our work. What are the difficult histories of our field that have been overlooked and/or underrepresented when we talk about the canon of scientific accomplishment? How can we remember these histories in a meaningful way and engage with it critically to avoid repeating catastrophic events? And ultimately, as a community of scientists, how shared is our understanding of our ethical responsibility regarding how we advise on the utilization of our work?