3 ms·

> the fury of a thousand suns off topic, but I recently learn that this phrase dates back to the Bhagavad Gita! If the radiance of a thousand suns Wer

• zentropia 5y ago
  If I remember well was a phrase used by Oppenheimer about the atomic bomb, a sentence that he read from Bhagavad Gita.
• OJFord 5y ago
  How literally was that translated though? Ngram viewer shows [0] plenty of usage of 'of a thousand suns' well before that 1944 translation [1], though it certainly picked up after that, no doubt helped by Oppenheimer quoting it (that translation specifically, recently published at the time) w.r.t. the Manhattan project. Confusingly [1] links to the passage in a different (1909-14) translation [2] which features the 'of a thousand suns' part but is otherwise different. I just wonder, for example if the original was something like लक्षाणाम् सूर्याणाम् 'lakshāñām sūryāñām' (I think that's what I mean, I'm learning Hindi not Sanskrit! Just looking up लाख & सूरज roots.) but translated to 'thousand' on the basis that it just meant 'a lot', and that sounded better in English and was perhaps even already a phrase. I don't mean to doubt you, just thought it was interesting, and translated texts are a bit of a can of worms. [0] - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=of+a+thousand+suns&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=of+a+thousand+... [1] - https://www.bartleby.com/73/123.html https://www.bartleby.com/73/123.html [2] - https://www.bartleby.com/45/4/11.html#44 https://www.bartleby.com/45/4/11.html#44