Quotes About Science

Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.

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

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.

The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . 

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart

Rutherford's and Soddy's discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.

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.

found that scientists think about problems in much the same way artists do. Scientists and artists proved less similar in personality than in cognition, but both groups were similarly different from businessmen.

Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.727

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, "You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?" And I answered, "binary fission." He wanted to know if you could call it "fission" alone, and I said you could.

Distilling these mixtures in turn came to be called "cracking" them—breaking them open, as it were.

Of Thursday, August 20, 1942, Seaborg writes: Perhaps today was the most exciting and thrilling day I have experienced since coming to the Met Lab. Our microchemists isolated pure element 94 for the first time!

free of carrier material. . . .1606 This precipitate of 94, which was viewed under the microscope and which was also visible to the naked eye, did not differ visibly from the rare-earth fluorides. . . . It is the first time that element 94 . . . has been beheld by the eye of man.

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

he had worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish and had designed and built the Harvard cyclotron that now served the Manhattan Project's purposes on the Hill.

In further experiments with permanent magnets and coils, he obtained a consistent result: only when the magnet was moved briskly in relation to the coil did the galvanometer's needle move.

Like his competitors, Faraday was looking for a steady electric current from magnetism. He held back reporting his results.

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers.

Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery.1030 Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron. . . . When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted . . . then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

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.

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

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.

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.