Quotes from Richard Rhodes

When Groves called, Oppenheimer chatted happily about the Bethe results. The general interrupted: "What about the weather?" "The weather is whimsical," the whimsical physicist said.2399 The Gulf air mass had stagnated over the test site. But change was coming. Jack Hubbard, the meteorologist, predicted light and variable winds the next day.

In 1883 Stanley conceived the idea of an alternating-current generator with a secondary feedback circuit: a pair of small extra coils that automatically cut in or out of the circuit to stabilize it whenever the voltage dropped.

Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt "a terrible bereavement . . . partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would be thinking of what needed to be done in the future." Now he saw that "Colonel Stimson was thinking hard and seriously about the implications for mankind of the thing we had created and the wall into the future that we had breached.

The pile as it waited in the dark cold of Chicago winter to be released to the breeding of neutrons and plutonium contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal. It cost about $1 million to produce and build. Its only visible moving parts were its various control rods.

streams, and rivers foully polluted them. Gaslight had too many advantages to resist, however. Pollution is seldom the first concern when new technologies are introduced.

Whatever scientists of one warring nation could conceive, the scientists of another warring nation might also conceive—and keep secret. That early in 1939 and early 1940, the nuclear arms race began.

The colonists competed for the wood, however. The first American sawmill began operations in 1663 on the Salmon Falls River in New Hampshire, long before the English advanced from sawing board by hand to using water power.

Planck solved the radiation problem by proposing that the vibrating particles can only radiate at certain energies.

Gamma rays could deflect electrons, a phenomenon known as the Compton effect after its discoverer, the American experimental physicist Arthur Holly Compton, but a proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron and not easily moved.

Stanley's breakthrough came in studying the Siemens system. He realized, he said, that if he could make an induction coil—a "transformer," he called it now—wired in parallel rather than in series, each coil would operate independently. That arrangement would keep the current steady whatever the demand and even if a component failed.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

10 Coal, with its ubiquitous content of uranium and thorium, releases more radioactivity into the environment when it is burned than any other fuel.

Planck, a thoroughgoing conservative, had no taste for pursuing the radical consequences of his radiation formula. Someone else did: Albert Einstein. In a paper in 1905 that eventually won for him the Nobel Prize, Einstein connected Planck's idea of limited, discontinuous energy levels to the problem of the photoelectric effect.

Paraphrasing one of the king's speeches before Parliament in his stark summary of the consequences, Standish concluded: "And so it may be conceived, no wood, no kingdom.

But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency.

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.

Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.

Coal had served blacksmiths for hundreds of years. Soap boilers used it; so did lime burners, who roasted limestone in kilns to make quicklime for plaster; so did salt boilers, who boiled down seawater in open iron pans, a tedious process prodigal of fuel, to make salt for food preservation in the centuries before refrigeration.

In every case the kicks increased on the oscilloscope; the powerful beryllium radiation knocked protons out of all the elements Chadwick tested. It knocked about the same number out of each element. And, most important for his conclusion, the energies of the recoiling protons were significantly greater than they could possibly be if the beryllium radiation consisted of gamma rays.

Carbon-arc lighting, too bright and hot for household use, would become important in industrial, lighthouse, street, and retail lighting in the decades ahead.

Emancipations as they progressed within less revolutionary states included Holland-Belgium, 1795; Sweden, 1848; Denmark and Greece, 1849; England by a gradual unmuddling completely in 1866; Austria, 1867; Spain by the withdrawal of its 1492 order of expulsion in 1868; the new German Empire, 1871. Though they were influential out of all proportion to their numbers, the emancipated Jews of Western Europe, many of whom moved directly to assimilate, were only a minute fraction of the Diaspora.

Fermi had scalers that counted off boron trifluoride readings with loud clicks and a cylindrical pen recorder that performed a similar function silently, graphing pile intensities in ink on a roll of slowly rotating graph paper. For calculations he relied on his own trusted six-inch slide rule, the pocket calculator of its day.

Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.