Quotes About Science

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

C. P. Snow, who was also present, remembers the performance as "one of the shortest accounts ever made about a major discovery." When tall and birdlike Chadwick finished speaking he looked over the assembly and announced abruptly, "Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight.

They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.

This time," he told Weil, "take the control rod out twelve inches." Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. "This is going to do it," Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi's side. "Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.

Fermi allowed himself a grin. He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile achieved a k of 1.0006.1700 Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts.

The purpose of science, he believed, was to set men free. Totalitarianism, in Hannah Arendt's powerful image, drove toward "destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other."923 It was entirely in character that Bohr, at a time of increasing danger, publicly opposed that drive with the individualistic and enriching discretions of complementarity.

Evangelista Torricelli. Torricelli's experiments led to the invention of the mercury-column barometer, which responds to changes in air pressure—that is, to changes in the density of the column of air above the instrument.

TRUTH 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 is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

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.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.

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

The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.

Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does!

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

In short, when it comes to an instant fix for everyday happiness, certain types of writing have a surprisingly quick and large impact. Expressing gratitude, thinking about a perfect future, and affectionate writing have been scientifically proven to work—and all they require is a pen, a piece of paper, and a few moments of your time.

I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery, and that science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery—a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

What's the big deal with Bejamin Frankin, anyway? I mean, so the guy invented electricity or whatever. That was hundreds of years ago. He didn't invent electricity, Amy said, trying not to sound too annoyed.He discovered that lightning was the same stuff as electicity. He invented lightning rods to protect buildings and experimented with batteries and- I do that. Have you ever put one on your tounge?

I felt a bit silly giving this advice to a girl who regularly fought monsters with golden swords, but I had promised Bill Nye the Science Guy I would always promote safe laboratory practices.

Of course, even without my help, other forces would keep the cosmos chugging along. Many different belief systems powered the revolution of the planets and stars. Wolves would still chase Sol across the sky. Ra would continue his daily journey in his sun barque. Tonatiuh would keep running on his surplus blood from human sacrifices back in the Aztec days. And that other thing—science— would still generate gravity and quantum physics or whatever.

The impossible is merely the possible for which we don't yet know the science

God does not play dice. ALBERT EINSTEIN

We, in our less than divine wisdom but apparently quite divine powers, are now transforming the planet like an Olympian might have created an Ice Age, or a Titan might have thrown down an asteroid from the sky to kill off a bunch of dinosaurs. We are the gods. Our scientists have said so.