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So Fermi said, "Well . . . there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made." Rabi said, "What do you mean by 'remote possibility'?" and Fermi said, "Well, ten per cent." Rabi said, "Ten per cent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that I might..
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Richard Rhodes |
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trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The practice of science was not itself a science; it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing.
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Richard Rhodes |
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physicist James Franck, head of the physics department at Haber's institute, who, like Haber and Hahn, would later win the Nobel Prize.342 So did a crowd of industrial chemists employed by I.G. Farben, a cartel of eight chemical companies assembled in wartime by the energetic Carl Duisberg of Bayer.
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Richard Rhodes |
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scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.
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Richard Rhodes |
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what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied.
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Richard Rhodes |
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They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening." Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war."
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Richard Rhodes |
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another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation--from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein's and concluding that nature only performed in consonance with his mathematics, Lawrence flipping compulsively through obscure foreign journals: Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not see..
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Richard Rhodes |
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In ten days and 1,600 sorties the Twentieth Air Force burned out 32 square miles of the centers of Japan's four largest cities and killed at least 150,000 people and almost certainly tens of thousands more.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns." Each interlocking system was logical in itself ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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When he thundered up the steep staircase [of the institute], two steps at a time, there were few of us younger ones that could keep pace with him. The peace of the library was often broken by a brisk game of pingpong, and I don't remember ever beating Bohr at that game.
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Richard Rhodes |
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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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was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The 509th commander introduced Parsons, who wasted no words. He told the crews the bomb they were going to drop was something new in the history of warfare, the most destructive weapon ever made: it would probably almost totally destroy an area three miles across.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)
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Richard Rhodes |
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Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice..
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Richard Rhodes |
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Time: 0529:45. The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at thirty-two detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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The history professor Lifton interviewed is similarly at a loss: I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared. . . . I was shocked by the sight. . . . What I felt then and still feel now I just can't explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that--but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima--was so shocking that I simply can't express what I felt. . . . Hirosh..
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Richard Rhodes |
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Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. "It is no exaggeration to say," reports the Japanese study, "that the whole city was ruined instantaneously."2679 Material losses alone equaled the annual incomes of more than 1.1 million people. "In Hiroshima many major facilities--prefectural office, city hall, fire departments, police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram and telepho..
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Richard Rhodes |
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This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don't have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses--120 war-horses--musi..
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Richard Rhodes |
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He had dreamed that atomic energy might substitute exploration for war, carrying men away from the narrow earth into the cosmos. He knew now that long before it propelled any such exodus it would increase war's devastation and mire man deeper in fear. He blinked behind his glasses. It was the end of the beginning. It might well be the beginning of the end. "There was a crowd there and then Fermi and I stayed there alone. I shook hands with ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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Rutherford's and Soddy's discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Bacher asked for a receipt from the Army for the material it would soon explode. Los Alamos was officially an extension of the University of California working for the Army under contract and Bacher wanted to document the university's release from responsibility for some millions of dollars' worth of plutonium that would soon be vaporized. Bainbridge thought the ceremony a waste of time but Farrell saw its point and agreed. To relieve the t..
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Richard Rhodes |
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when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing--a very bad, an execrable drawing--of a bomb.
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Richard Rhodes |
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thorium was also for some years incorporated into a popular German toothpaste, Doramad. Auer, the company that made German gas mantles, also made the toothpaste.
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Richard Rhodes |
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About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Bohr had learned to be alert for bright students who were not afraid to argue.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter's ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established--and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.
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Richard Rhodes |
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if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Today Hedy's invention serves millions through GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS satellites, Bluetooth, cell-phone, and digital wireless systems. (illustration credit i1.23)
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Richard Rhodes |
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Bohr's office, borrowed from Albert Einstein. It was spacious, with leaded windows, a fireplace, a large blackboard, an Oriental rug to warm the floor.1089
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Richard Rhodes |
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Einstein had judged it too large and moved into a small secretarial annex nearby.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The English were the first to expel the Jews entirely. The Jews of England belonged to the Crown, which had systematically extracted their wealth through a special Exchequer to the Jews. By 1290 it had bled them dry. Edward I thereupon confiscated what little they had left and threw them out. They crossed to France, but expulsion from that country followed in 1392; from Spain, at the demand of the Inquisition, in 1492; from Portugal in 1497..
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Richard Rhodes |
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But while Poland had welcomed them, Russia despised them. Its economy was too primitive to need their commercial skills and it abhorred their religion. To Catherine the Great her one million new subjects were first and foremost "the enemies of Christ."
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Richard Rhodes |
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Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.
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Richard Rhodes |
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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." It seemed to him then that "there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden."624"
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Richard Rhodes |
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The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion--Judaism--and came back bitterly disillusioned: "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . "
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Richard Rhodes |
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the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a "strategy of attrition." The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a "strategy" so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expe..
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Richard Rhodes |
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They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out. They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to the whole. The nucleus would oscillate. In one of its many random m..
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Richard Rhodes |
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notes, "that the original unlicensed device was a 'couch potato'-like remote control for radio receivers." So the 1939 Philco Mystery Control once again revealed its originality.) If all this bureaucratic infighting seems obscure, what followed from it is happily familiar. "The rules adopted," Marcus writes, "had a much greater impact than any of [their] advocates could ever have imagined at the time. They enabled the development of Wi-Fi, ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians and teachers, although a minority of experimentalists were farmers' sons.
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Richard Rhodes |