Ann Finkbeiner

The Jasons are the most powerful people you've never heard of. An elite advisory group composed of a veritable who's who of American physics, the Jasons have been providing cutting edge scientific expertise to the Department of Defense and other agencies for nearly fifty years.

Finkbeiner manages to depict both the personal charisma and fascination of the Jasons, and their murky ethical role. True genius is strange, and appealing, and a large part of why Jason persists is the pleasure that show more it's members take in working with each other; a pleasure echoed in Finkbeiner description of interviews with luminaries such as John Wheeler (many worlds interpretation, black holes) and Freeman Dyson (polymath of the 20th century).

However, at the same time that they break new intellectual ground for the sheer joy of it, Jason is an integral part of the defense establishment, and works to improve weapons. Smart bombs, combat sensors, and strategic missile defense can all be traced back to Jason, and this book does an excellent job putting a human face on a scientist's many obligations: to knowledge, to humanity, and to his or her country. Jasons see themselves as patriots, but have been labelled as war criminals. On balance, even as advance the science of death, the Jasons have injected sanity and reason into nuclear armaggedon. The science that makes the comprehensive test ban treaty possible was pioneered by Jason, while adaptive optics and oceanic tomography have advanced natural science.

For good or ill, Jason is a unique organization, and one that any scholar of science policy should be familiar with as an exemplar of what can be done at the very top of science. show less

A book that explores our own resilience in the midst of one of the most distressful forms of human suffering, the death of a child. Because children aren't supposed to die, the loss is not only painful but profoundly disorienting. Finkbeiner, whose only child died in 1987, refers to her own experience and the experience of others to show that while bereaved parents can never really let go, they can and do recover, often developing a new appreciation for their own lives.

A biography of the Jasons, a loose group of top US scientists who independently work on both classified and non-classified projects of their own choosing, mostly for the Defense Department. I knew the names of many of the physicists named in the book (and who I didn't know were Jasons), and was surprised to discover that a former academic adviser of mine is now a member. It was an interesting glimpse into this secretive group of scientists and their role in US science policy throughout the show more cold war and beyond, mostly through interviews with members, supplemented with material from unpublished internal histories from both the DoD and the Jasons themselves. show less

I was impress with the use of the word ' anent ' too ( ! )