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7247d91
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Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
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science
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Richard Rhodes |
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17e3f95
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For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery--that most unstable existential moment--the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.
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discovery
inspiration
science
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Richard Rhodes |
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c112dad
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The world is full of terrible suffering, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea.
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Richard Rhodes |
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04a490b
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The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]
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science
education
baron-c-p-snow
baron-snow
c-p-snow
charles-percy-snow
ernest-rutherford
nucleus
rutherford
oxford
cambridge
study
physics
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Richard Rhodes |
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d3a2d91
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Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premis..
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theory
science
the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb
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Richard Rhodes |
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b4ae016
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Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. "A chemist's nightmare," the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then "a physicist's nightmare." "Not exactly," Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together: 'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else..
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Richard Rhodes |
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46444c1
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Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements.
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science
life
triumph
public-health
medicine
technology
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Richard Rhodes |
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1654399
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Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.
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science
richard-rhodes
the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb
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Richard Rhodes |
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1891d0c
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We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes "the world" is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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f4f45ae
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When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.
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criminals
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Richard Rhodes |
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4fafa7f
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During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would "stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City."896 The letter provoked comment, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was "very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?" As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938."
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Richard Rhodes |
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9a3cb20
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It was "not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one's native land and sees that one has been abandoned." - Antheil"
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Richard Rhodes |
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148265e
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The concoction of the Protocols was probably the work of the head of the czarist secret police outside Russia, a Paris-based agent named Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Borrowing and paraphrasing Machiavelli's speeches without even bothering to change their order and attributing them to a secret Jewish council, Rachkovsky was attempting to discredit Russian liberalism by showing it to be a Jewish plot.
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Richard Rhodes |
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c00328e
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Consistent with Martin Klaproth's inspiration in 1789 to link his discovery of a new element with the recent discovery of the planet Uranus and with McMillan's suggestion to extend the scheme to Neptune, Seaborg would name element 94 for Pluto, the ninth planet outward from the sun, discovered in 1930 and named for the Greek god of the underworld, a god of the earth's fertility but also the god of the dead: plutonium. *
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Richard Rhodes |
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431e270
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The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary--Fermi was only then inventing that specialty--but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city.
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Richard Rhodes |
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b6f1a29
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Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.
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Richard Rhodes |
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8704849
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The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial or social life of our country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties.
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Richard Rhodes |
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3abf230
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on his first visit to the Los Alamos Tech Area, when he had encountered von Neumann discussing theory with dark, intense Edward Teller, the "tremendously long formulae on the blackboard" had scared him. "Seeing all these complications of analysis, I was dumbfounded, fearing I would never be able to contribute anything." But the equations stayed on the board from day to day, which meant to Ulam that the pace of invention was relatively slow,..
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Richard Rhodes |
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a3a93fb
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Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is "the gradual removal of prejudices."
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Richard Rhodes |
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5061de8
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Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation, brutally resolving their worst disputes. Now an ultimate power had appeared.
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Richard Rhodes |
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ccb6663
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Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley.
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Richard Rhodes |
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56061a5
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I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.
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Richard Rhodes |
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18bbf88
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In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons--no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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509d172
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the process of writing is always a healing process because the function of creation is always, always, the alleviation of pain--the writer's, first of all, and then the pain of those who read what she has written. Imagination is compassionate. Writing is a form of making, and making humanizes the world.1
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Richard Rhodes |
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a810246
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Germany had been united in empire for only eight years when Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He grew up in Munich. He was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the "miracle" of a compass his father showed him excited him so much, he remembered, that he "trembled and grew cold."..
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Richard Rhodes |
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64f943c
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The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man." The fire storm at Dresden may have killed more people but not in so short a space of time. More than 100,000 men, women and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a million in all lost their ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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e186560
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But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent t..
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Richard Rhodes |
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d57fa05
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'Reedlike, that's what Hedy Kiesler is, sweet and reedlike, and when she wants to talk to you she doesn't lean over your shoulder and arch herself out behind like a debutante....She leans back from you [and] takes a good look in your eyes and a firm grip on your name before she will allow herself to say a word.'
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hedy-lamarr
inventor
dancing
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Richard Rhodes |
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55f6f77
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Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning--or choosing--to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.
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Richard Rhodes |
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b4148df
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With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews.
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Richard Rhodes |
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702fedd
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In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required "that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative population of the various races or nationalities."
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Richard Rhodes |
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8c1503c
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Chaim Weizmann gives some measure of that totality in the harsher world of the Russian Pale when he writes that "the acquisition of knowledge was not for us so much a normal process of education as the storing up of weapons in an arsenal by means of which we hoped later to be able to hold our own in a hostile world."
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Richard Rhodes |
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324b685
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The bow of the Carpathians as they curve around northwestward begins to define the northern border of Czechoslovakia. Long before it can complete that service the bow bends down toward the Austrian Alps, but a border region of mountainous uplift, the Sudetes, continues across Czechoslovakia. Some sixty miles beyond Prague it turns southwest to form a low range between Czechoslovakia and Germany that is called, in German, the Erzgebirge: the..
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Richard Rhodes |
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be61ecb
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There are those about us who say that such research should be stopped by law, alleging that man's destructive powers are already large enough. [...] There is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbour (Aston in 1936)
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Richard Rhodes |
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e17e6ad
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products." The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military's $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm's Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electroni..
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Richard Rhodes |
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2f325a5
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British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight.
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Richard Rhodes |
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8ef0ee8
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The physics faculty of the University of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue,
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Richard Rhodes |
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aa804b8
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Science grew out of the craft tradition
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Richard Rhodes |
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9cc0104
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informal system of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more recent system of the European graduate school.
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Richard Rhodes |
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f1520b5
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Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century's most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Karman, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller.
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Richard Rhodes |
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51a3cd9
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Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein's personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein's own terms. God does not throw dice? "Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world."502"
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Richard Rhodes |
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c2dfed7
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two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate's work.
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Richard Rhodes |
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ecdeebc
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He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution--literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out t..
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Richard Rhodes |
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6482967
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A.E.G., the German General Electric, signed Szilard on as a paid consultant and actually built one of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators, but the magnetic pump was so noisy compared to even the noisy conventional compressors of the day that it never left the engineering lab.
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Richard Rhodes |