Quotes from Richard Rhodes

The Air Force had discovered the jet stream.

Fermi sent them out again in the early 1930s, after the decision to go into nuclear physics: Segrè to work with Otto Stern in Hamburg, Amaldi to Leipzig to the laboratory of the physical chemist Peter Debye, Rasetti to Lise Meitner at the KWI.

The gases in a coal mine could kill. Miners called them damps, from Middle Low German dampf, vapors.

Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement, and I therefore think that action should be taken in the sense proposed by Lord Cherwell.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds.

A fuel's octane rating is a measure of how much it can be compressed before the heat of compression ignites it. Octane ratings at American gasoline pumps today, for example, range from 87 to 93. Pure alcohol has an octane rating of 105.

Compton had in fact demonstrated in 1923 what Einstein had postulated in 1905 in his theory of the photoelectric effect: that light was wave but also simultaneously particle, photon.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

The hardest challenge of early coal mining was drainage. Rainwater flows through rills and streams into brooks and brooks into rivers, drawn always downward by gravity to the sea. About a third of any rainfall soaks into the soil and percolates downward into the earth. Eventually it encounters impermeable layers of rock. There it spreads out and flows along the rock layer until it finds cracks or permeable rock, when it continues percolating down to the next impermeable layer.

Thus soaking, filtering, spreading, it saturates the permeable rock to form a subterranean lake: an aquifer. To create a water well, dig a hole far enough into the ground to penetrate below the surface of this aquifer; your hole will fill to the level of that surface—the water table—and refill as water is withdrawn.

Arnold Sommerfeld hailed the Compton effect—elastic scattering of a photon by an electron—as "probably the most important discovery which could have been made in the current state of physics" because it proved that photons exist, which hardly anyone in 1923 yet believed, and demonstrated clearly the dual nature of light as both particle and wave.

By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

said that when it happened, the French would pray for the victims, the British would organize their rescue, and the Americans would pay for

Robert Oppenheimer thus acquired for Los Alamos what Leo Szilard had not been able to organize in Chicago: scientific freedom of speech. The price the new community paid, a social but more profoundly a political price, was a guarded barbed-wire fence around the town and a second guarded barbed-wire fence around the laboratory itself, emphasizing that the scientists and their families were walled off where knowledge of their work was concerned not only from the world but even from each other.

The volume of water and feed that city horses consumed was matched by their daily output of urine and manure. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine daily and thirty to fifty pounds of manure. That volume filled the New York streets daily with about four million pounds and a hundred thousand gallons of redolent excreta that had to be cleared away. When it wasn't, the streets mired up.

In the early 1740s, Coalbrookdale replaced its own horse-driven pumps with a Newcomen engine, the first time a steam engine was used to make iron, and a major reduction in expense.54 From this point forward, mining advanced rapidly, as an increasing number of steam engines restored old mines previously drowned and kept new mines dry.55

But the great mast trees took 80 to 120 years to grow to sufficient diameter. A landowner who planted an acorn could hope his grandchildren or great-grandchildren might harvest it for profit—if the intervening generations could wait so long. Many could not; many did not. Selling timber was an easy means to raise cash; landowners from the king on down took advantage of the opportunity whenever their purses emptied.

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world's first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.

By 1883, the Chincha Islands had been exhausted of their treasure, the great stacks of guano stripped away and shipped to Britain, Europe, and the United States.

When I told him about the [recent discovery of spectral lines where Bohr's theory had predicted they should appear] the big eyes of Einstein looked still bigger and he told me "Then it is one of the greatest discoveries.

But American science, spurred on by British appeals, was finally gearing up for war. Churchill had sent over Henry Tizard in the late summer of 1940 with a delegation of experts and a black-enameled metal steamer trunk, the original black box, full of military secrets.

Mountain climbing had long been a Hans Bethe hobby. He and Fermi, among others, sometimes scaled Lake Peak across the Rio Grande in the Sangre de Cristos, one of Bethe's admiring group leaders remembers, to "sit there in the sunshine" at 12,500 feet "discussing physics problems. This is how many discoveries were made.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.