ABSTRACT
On the note of wonder and curiosity, the author wants to return to the question of whether we ought to understand the Manhattan Project as something like a failure of wonder or conversely the outcome of wonder followed to its logical conclusion. He argues that Fiege's account does not adequately distinguish many different dispositions that, rightly or wrongly, have been associated with wonder. Upon closer inspection, the objects of wonder turn out not to be the natural world as for example, the nature-study movement would have insisted but human achievements or creations. In theological traditions, curiosity has been associated with avarice, lust, idleness and vainglorious pursuits. Yet, as critics such as Rubenstein and Carson warn, wonder never is eclipsed entirely, but may turn dangerously inward toward the human agent who becomes its source and object and again outward in displays of shock and awe violently imposed upon others.
