Quotes from Kai Bird

They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project

That summer of 1928, Robert was also reading the 1922 novel The Enormous Room, an account by e. e. cummings of his four-month incarceration in a French wartime prison camp. He loved cummings' notion that a man stripped of all his possessions can nevertheless find personal freedom in the most spartan of surroundings. The story would take on a new meaning for him after 1954.

atomic diplomacy against the Soviet Union was a factor in President Truman's decision to use the bomb against a Japanese enemy that appeared to be defeated militarily.

He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline. He's outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant." Ehrenfest's reply is lost, but Born's next letter is indicative: "Your information about Oppenheimer was very valuable to me. I know that he is a very fine and decent man, but you can't help it if someone gets on your nerves.

I am very distressed, as I assume you are, over the Oppenheimer matter. I feel that it is somewhat like inquiring into the security risk of a Newton or a Galileo.

Weinberg happily realized that at Berkeley, "Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.

Carter is sometimes perceived as a failure simply because he refused to make us feel good about the country. He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ´failure´ than to grapple with the hard problems. Ultimately, Carter was replaced by a sunny, more reassuring politician who simply promised that he would ´make America great again.´

the relations were of a

Harvard gave him a volume of Galileo's early writings. He was assigned

but "we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth." However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute "denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement." No one left the auditorium that night unmoved.

You have to take the whole story." Rabi insisted. "That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man; what made him act, what he did and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here- you are writing a man's life.

After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, "My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined.

I know three people who are interested in politics. Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?

Oppenheimer quite naturally found it comforting to be told by Bohr that the contradictions in life were nevertheless all of a piece—and therefore complementary.

Once again, Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.

To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me.

absurd." Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn't exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets).

Science is deeply embedded in modern civilization—but the average citizen does not understand the scientific life or how scientific discoveries are made. Neither is it generally understood that scientific discovery is never a neat story. Writing about a life in science is thus by definition particularly onerous. The biographer in this case has to understand not only the life but also the science.

Much later, Groves seriously pursued the notion of kidnapping or assassinating Heisenberg; in 1944 he dispatched OSS agent Moe Berg to Switzerland, where the former baseball player stalked the German physicist in December 1944—but ultimately decided not to attempt an assassination.

Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman "The Mosquito" and Bethe "The Battleship.

The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.

Richard Feynman, an incorrigible practical joker, had his own way of dealing with security regulations. When the censors complained that his wife, Arline, now a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, was sending him letters in code and asked for the code, Feynman explained that he didn't have the key to it—it was a game he played with his wife to practice his code-breaking.

The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.

Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.