Quotes from Richard Rhodes

The Scots had deforested their lands a century before the English. They were used to burning coal, and luckily for them, hard Scottish coal burned cleaner and brighter than soft Newcastle bituminous.

In the next hundred years, wooden wagonways diffused across England.

He spoke of "the possible existence of an atom of mass 1 which has zero nucleus charge." Such an atomic structure, he thought, seemed by no means impossible. It would not be a new elementary particle, he supposed, but a combination of existing particles, an electron and a proton intimately united, forming a single neutral particle.

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

Unfortunately, Scottish anthracite burned faster as well, which made it more expensive. Expense was no problem for the king; he had good Scottish coal shipped to Westminster to warm his palaces. Emulating the king, wealthy Londoners took up the custom. The middle classes began burning coal as well. Coal allowed Londoners to keep warm and feed themselves as the city's population increased rapidly, from roughly 200,000 in 1600 to 350,000 by 1650.

The whaling era that opened after the War of 1812, from about 1817 to the mid-1850s, has come to be called whaling's golden age. Its primary anchorage shifted from Nantucket Island to New Bedford, below Cape Cod at the mouth of the Acushnet River.

They discussed the long, thorough theoretical paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, "The mechanism of nuclear fission," that had been published in the September Physical Review and especially its conclusion, which Bohr and Wheeler had elaborated from Bohr's Sunday-morning graph work, that U235 was probably the isotope of uranium responsible for slow-neutron fission.1205

Laboratories in the mid-nineteenth century systematically investigated the properties of electromagnetism. That research paralleled the development of the electric generator and its reverse, the electric motor.

In each mere gram of uranium there are about 2.5 × 1021 atoms, an absurdly large number, 25 followed by twenty zeros: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

But 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. - Niels Bohr

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

Evelyn did more than complain. He also looked for ways to clear the air. He accepted appointment as one of London's commissioners of sewers. And since he was interested in gardening and in trees, his inventive mind turned to moving industry out of London and perfuming the city's precincts with flowering plants—reversing, as it were, at least locally, the transition from wood to coal. King Charles II had been restored to the throne on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660

had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.2146 And I needed what they saw, and needed them." Certainly he found the more traditional alleviation of losing himself in work.

as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind—is one way the poem expresses the paradox.

a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.

Alternating current had a massive advantage over direct current: it could be transformed easily into a higher or lower voltage. Voltage, like water pressure, moves electric charge. Amperage, like water volume, delivers more charge. The two qualities interact inversely. Stepping up voltage reduces amperage. Stepping up voltage allows alternating current to flow on wires of smaller diameter without encountering as much energy-sapping resistance.

But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent.

One of Oppenheimer's students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that "when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

In mid-November Fermi reorganized his team into two twelve-hour shifts, a day crew under Walter Zinn (who continued to supervise materials production as well), a night crew under Herbert Anderson. Construction began on Monday morning, November 16, 1942.

Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.

Bohr was different in another regard as well; he was easily the most talented of all Rutherford's many students—and Rutherford trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.

sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.