Quotes from Richard Rhodes

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. *

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.

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.

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 to modern eyes.

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.

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.

British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight.

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.

The physics faculty of the University of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue

Science grew out of the craft tradition

informal system of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more recent system of the European graduate school.

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 the war innocently on a laboratory shelf.

Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.

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.

Then everyone began to wonder why he didn't shut the pile off," Anderson continues. 1701 "But Fermi was completely calm. He waited another minute, then another, and then when it seemed that the anxiety was too much to bear, he ordered 'ZIP in!' " It was 3: 53 P.M. Fermi had run the pile for 4.5 minutes at one-half watt and brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus.

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.

Physics students at that time wandered Europe in search of exceptional masters much as their forebears in scholarship and craft had done since medieval days. Universities in Germany were institutions of the state; a professor was a salaried civil servant who also collected fees directly from his students for the courses he chose to give (a Privatdozent

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 Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller.

collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.

two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate's work.

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

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

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.