Quotes from Richard Rhodes

The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter's ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established—and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.

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.

if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.

Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice sounded surprised.

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.

During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would "stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City."896 The letter provoked comment, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was "very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?" As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938.

It is wrong," he told his colleagues repeatedly, "to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is"—which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature."290

scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.