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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 66db9de | An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the .. | earth flight humanity | Barry Lopez | |
| 6b8b17d | What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of. | Barry Lopez | ||
| 65cd93e | In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne's lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort...because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychologica.. | evolution mystery nature spirit wisdom | Barry Lopez | |
| d0ece11 | The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into a graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the s.. | nature ocean peacefulness wildlife | Barry Lopez | |
| cc07721 | Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as "invasive" or "foreign" and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are f.. | Barry Lopez | ||
| 0e843a5 | In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez recounts the story of an ethnographer posing a riddle to an elder among the Nunamiut, a tribe in northern Alaska. At the end of his life, the researcher asked, who knows more about life in Alaska--how to escape a blizzard, how to find caribou, how to survive on such a harsh landscape--a wolf or a man? "The same," the elder replied. "They know the same." | Nate Blakeslee | ||
| c00328e | 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. * | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 431e270 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| b6f1a29 | Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 8704849 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 3abf230 | 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,.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| a3a93fb | 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." | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 5061de8 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| ccb6663 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 56061a5 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 18bbf88 | 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 .. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 509d172 | 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 | Richard Rhodes | ||
| a810246 | 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.".. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 64f943c | 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 .. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| e186560 | 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.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| d57fa05 | '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.' | dancing hedy-lamarr inventor | Richard Rhodes | |
| 55f6f77 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| b4148df | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 702fedd | 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." | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 8c1503c | 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." | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 324b685 | 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.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| be61ecb | 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) | Richard Rhodes | ||
| e17e6ad | 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.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 2f325a5 | British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 8ef0ee8 | The physics faculty of the University of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, | Richard Rhodes | ||
| aa804b8 | Science grew out of the craft tradition | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 9cc0104 | informal system of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more recent system of the European graduate school. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| f1520b5 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 51a3cd9 | 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" | Richard Rhodes | ||
| c2dfed7 | two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate's work. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| ecdeebc | 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.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 6482967 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| eab65d5 | 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.. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 91f10ee | trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 2e12c90 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 9fdb605 | The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 6470f57 | 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. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| fe3cc64 | scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them. | Richard Rhodes | ||
| 1e20126 | 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. | Richard Rhodes |