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American scientist in his prime: He is likely to have been a sickly child or to have lost a parent at an early age. He has a very high I.Q. and in boyhood began to do a great deal of reading. He tended to feel lonely and "different" and to be shy and aloof from his classmates."
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Richard Rhodes |
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3f7dce9
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What decided him (almost invariably) was a college project in which he had occasion to do some independent research--to find out things for himself. Once he discovered the pleasures of this kind of work, he never turned back. He is completely satisfied with his chosen vocation. . . . He works hard and devotedly in his laboratory, often seven days a week.
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Richard Rhodes |
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found that scientists think about problems in much the same way artists do. Scientists and artists proved less similar in personality than in cognition, but both groups were similarly different from businessmen.
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Richard Rhodes |
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In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council's plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s; Henry Ford took the forgery as literally as Adolf Hitler did.
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Richard Rhodes |
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d48a1db
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Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end--domination and control--one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.
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Richard Rhodes |
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015e176
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collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.
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Richard Rhodes |
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the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.
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Richard Rhodes |
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The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous," he challenged the army commanders. "Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brain..
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Richard Rhodes |
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443012a
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It is wrong," he told his colleagues repeatedly, "to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is"--which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature."290"
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Richard Rhodes |
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fab37ff
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I try not to speak more clearly than I think.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Einstein was arguing against quantum theory just as irrationally as his opponents had argued against relativity theory. Einstein remained adamant (he remained adamant to the end of his life where quantum theory was concerned).
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Richard Rhodes |
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f11f6da
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Chamberlain moved again to concession. "Appeasement" was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word."
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Richard Rhodes |
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few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.
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Richard Rhodes |
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rent a gram of radium for a minimum of three months for $125 a month.
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Richard Rhodes |
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physicists were almost all either first-born sons or eldest sons. Theoretical physicists averaged the highest verbal IQ's among all scientists studied, clustering around 170, almost 20 percent higher than the experimentalists.524 Theoreticians also averaged the highest spatial IQ's, experimentalists ranking second.
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Richard Rhodes |
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We were reasonably strong, but I mean we were, after all, thinkers. So Dean Pegram again looked around and said that seems to be a job a little bit beyond your feeble strength, but there is a football squad at Columbia that contains a dozen or so of very husky boys who take jobs by the hour just to carry them through college. 1541 Why don't you hire them? And it was a marvelous idea; it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of t..
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Richard Rhodes |
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d99cc7a
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Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century because increasingly efficient killing technologies made the extreme exercise of national sovereignty pathological.
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Richard Rhodes |
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2fb11db
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It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It
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Richard Rhodes |
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does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us--it gives information about the correlations between
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Richard Rhodes |
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Violent actors act violently not because they are mentally ill or come from violent subcultures or are brain damaged or have low self-esteem but because they have different phantom communities from the rest of us. That difference is the reason they attach different, violent meanings to their social experiences.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Now we are all sons of bitches.'
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Richard Rhodes |
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mid-June 1915, "the wind was favourable and we discharged a very poisonous gas, a mixture of chlorine and phosgene, against the [Russian] enemy lines. . . .344 Not a single shot was fired. . . . The attack was a complete success."345" --
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Richard Rhodes |
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Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life: he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.
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Richard Rhodes |
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an excessive and unproductive deference of British physics students to their seniors. He therefore founded a club, the
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Richard Rhodes |
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Kapitza Club, devoted to open and unhierarchical discussion. Membership was limited and coveted. Members met in college rooms and
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Richard Rhodes |
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Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.
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Richard Rhodes |
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1626bf7
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a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.
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Richard Rhodes |
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sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.
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Richard Rhodes |
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A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.
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Richard Rhodes |
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26d7871
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Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.
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Richard Rhodes |
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of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.
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Richard Rhodes |
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902903f
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the energy from each bursting uranium nucleus would be sufficient to make a visible grain of sand visibly jump.
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Richard Rhodes |
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729c3da
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Mechanical proficiency and practical gadgets in America counterbalanced to an extent the beauty of Italy.
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Richard Rhodes |
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7d756d6
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In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word "unconditional" was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill's surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: "Peace can come to the world," the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, "only by the ..
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Richard Rhodes |
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Not even his most important discovery kept Fermi from going home for lunch.
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Richard Rhodes |
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there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.
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Richard Rhodes |
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there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.
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Richard Rhodes |
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A group of refugee scientists was gathered outside the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford the next morning discussing the Munich agreement when Frederick Lindemann drove up.937 Churchill had described the Czechoslovakian partition as amounting to "the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force."938 Lindemann, Churchill's intimate adviser, was equally disgusted. One of the refugees asked him if he thought Chamberla..
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Richard Rhodes |
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But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
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Richard Rhodes |
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people are more likely to refrain from violence out of preference for a nonviolent existence than they are to do so out of fear of punishment.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury, and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity--and not from any success in being God.
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Richard Rhodes |
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Not testosterone per se but the patriarchal preference for subjecting males to violentization, and their physical advantage in achieving early successful violent performances, explains why men are much more likely than women to be seriously violent.
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Richard Rhodes |