Quotes from Richard Rhodes

By 27 April, Dammam No. 7 had produced more than 100,000 barrels.30 Across the decades, until it was shut down in 1982, No. 7 alone produced more than 32 million barrels of oil.

it is possible to argue that some people are violent and mentally ill, but it is no longer defensible to argue that people are violent because they are mentally ill.

The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.

The character damage of a trauma survivor," he concludes, "can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.

If the first choice the Target Committee identified at its first meeting was hardly big enough to confine the potential damage, it was the best the enemy had left to offer: Hiroshima is the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list. Consideration should be given to this city.

He chose not to work through the limited official channels that the Army and the OSRD had devised to constrict the flow of information. "I wanted to let Oppenheimer know what we were doing. Someone in the Bureau of Ships knew one of the people in the [Navy] Bureau of Ordnance who was going out to Los Alamos. I remember that I met the man at the old Warner Theater here in Washington, up in the balcony—real cloak and dagger stuff.

The purpose of science, he believed, was to set men free. Totalitarianism, in Hannah Arendt's powerful image, drove toward "destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other."923 It was entirely in character that Bohr, at a time of increasing danger, publicly opposed that drive with the individualistic and enriching discretions of complementarity.

of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.

Despite their drawbacks, Newcomens revitalized the mining industry in north-central England.26 Between 1710 and 1733, when the patent expired, no fewer than 104 Newcomen engines were built in Britain and abroad.27 Many more would follow—550 or more by 1800—but coal's industrial uses were still limited.28 No one had yet devised a process for smelting good iron with coal; its primary market was still for home heating. As that market glutted, coal prices plummeted.

Early English roads were terrible. The Crown required landholders to maintain local roads at their own expense, one of three ancient obligations—to keep roads and bridges in repair, to build and maintain fortifications, and to serve in the militia—exacted to facilitate the kingdom's defense.30 Roads for ordinary communication and commerce were effectively orphans.

the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.

Lonnie Athens demonstrates to the contrary that violent people come to their violence by the same universal processes of soliloquy and dramatic self-change that carry the rest of us to conformity, pacifism, greatness, eccentricity or sainthood—and bear equal responsibility for their choices.

Evangelista Torricelli. Torricelli's experiments led to the invention of the mercury-column barometer, which responds to changes in air pressure—that is, to changes in the density of the column of air above the instrument.

The British population that used coal for heating and cooking was increasing, from 5.2 million in 1700 to 7.8 million in 1800, and on up to 12 million by 1831. Industry used coal for Newcomen engines pumping out coal mines and pumping water, although much of that coal was essentially mine waste. But iron smelting with coked coal began a major expansion after 1750, radiating outward from the Darby enterprise at Coalbrookdale and rapidly replacing smelting with charcoal made from wood.

Caldwell concluded that welding equipment and materials would cost no more than riveting, while the cost of labor would be reduced substantially.

TRUTH 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 is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

Early in 1945 Oak Ridge began shipping bomb-grade U235 to Los Alamos.

the energy from each bursting uranium nucleus would be sufficient to make a visible grain of sand visibly jump.

Ongoing observations at Mount Wilson Observatory, above Pasadena, might confirm the last of the three original predictions of the general theory of relativity, the gravitational red-shifting of the light of high-density stars.

In Berlin his son-in-law arranged to have his furniture packed. The French obligingly transported his personal papers to Paris by diplomatic pouch. At the end of March 1933 the most original physicist of the twentieth century once again renounced his German citizenship.

Busloads of visitors from Los Alamos and beyond had begun arriving at Compañia Hill, the viewing site twenty miles northwest of Zero, at 0200. Ernest Lawrence was there, Hans Bethe, Teller, Serber, Edwin McMillan, James Chadwick come to see what his neutron was capable of and a crowd of other men, including Trinity staff no longer needed down on the plain.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

Seaborg's team developed two separation processes to take advantage of the different chemistries of plutonium's several different valence states.

Allison began broadcasting the countdown. Richard Feynman, a future Nobel laureate who had entered physics as an adolescent via radio tinkering, tinkered the radio to life. Men began moving into position. "We were told to lie down on the sand," Teller protests, "turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.