David Hawkins was one of the 20th century's great thinkers in fields such as philosophy of science, ethics, mathematics, economics, history and the school. His most famous work was developing the Hawkins-Simon theorem in mathematical economics together with Herbert Simon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkins%E2%80%93Simon_condition
In the 1930s, he became friends with Robert Oppenheimer and lively discussed topics within philosophy both when it came to religions (especially Hinduism) and science. In particular, the discussion was lively about quantum physics, especially the uncertainty principle and complementarity.
In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr considered an essential feature. Objects have certain pairs of complementary properties that cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. An example of such a pair is position and momentum.
In 1943, Hawkins was invited by Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project. At the time, it was an open possibility that the Germans would develop atomic bombs first and thereby win the Second World War. Hawkins became a sort of intermediary or broker between the civilian scientists and the military leadership at Los Alamos. He was instrumental in solving the problem of branching a neutron multiplication in a nuclear chain reaction. Stan Frankel and Richard Feynman had tackled the problem using classical physics, but Hawkins and Stan Ulam approached it using probability theory, and with it created a new subfield now known as branching process theory. It was also Hawkins who chose the site for the Trinity test - the first nuclear explosion.
By USDE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wki4hg9Om-k, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129867581
Hawkins managed to solve a mathematical problem by combining fragments of philosophy, religion and physics. By joining forces, one can literally make a bomb!
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