Today's Stichomancy for Robert Oppenheimer

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson:

shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the breeze at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture! In this

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale:

Have those who wander through the ways of death, The still wan fields Elysian, any love To lift their breasts with longing, any lips To thirst against the quiver of a kiss? Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again, To make the people love, who hate me now. My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry Against the fate that made men love my mouth And left their spirits all too deaf to hear The little songs that echoed through my soul. I have no anger now. The dreams are done;

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest:

Would you take a fortune and never see The man, in a few brief years, he'll be? Suppose that his body were racked with pain, How much would you pay for his health again?

Is there money enough in the world to-day To buy your boy? Could a monarch pay You silver and gold in so large a sum That you'd have him blinded or stricken dumb? How much would you take, if you had the choice, Never to hear, in this world, his voice?

How much would you take in exchange for all

Just Folks

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne:

and I well remember that during the war, at the siege of Atlanta, some iron guns fired one thousand rounds at intervals of twenty minutes without injury."

"Cast iron is very brittle, though," replied Morgan.

"Yes, but it possesses great resistance. I will now ask our worthy secretary to calculate the weight of a cast-iron gun with a bore of nine feet and a thickness of six feet of metal."

"In a moment," replied Maston. Then, dashing off some algebraical formulae with marvelous facility, in a minute or two he declared the following result:

"The cannon will weigh 68,040 tons. And, at two cents a pound,

From the Earth to the Moon