Quotes About Fission

Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe.

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.

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium by a fission weapon—the hydrogen bomb.

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

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.

Rocket scientists agree that we have about reached the limit of our ability to travel in space using chemical rockets. To achieve anything near the speed of light we will need a new energy source and a new propellant. Nuclear fission is not an option.

he had evidently been listening. "Jenkins—" "Uh—sir?" "Don't you know about sergeants?" "Well . . . I'm learning." "They don't have mothers. Just ask any trained private." He blew smoke toward us. "They reproduce by fission . . . like all bacteria.

In the design of fission reactors man was not an innovator but an unwitting imitator of nature.

So a nuclear reactor is based on a nuclear chain reaction in much the same way as we have seen a nuclear bomb is also based on a nuclear chain reaction.

The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.

The Spanish Stairs were destroyed in the fission wars of the late twentieth century. They were rebuilt and destroyed again in the war of the World Restoration in the twenty-first century.

No war material has ever made that much difference.' 'No? I cite the fission bomb of 1945. I cite the Null-G anti-gravity installations of 2022. Talley's All-Field Radar Trip-Screen of 2194. Material can often make the difference, especially when there's the chance of the enemy getting it first.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

This minimum, the so-called critical mass, turned out to be a surprisingly small 4 kg, about the size of an apple.

The fundamental point in fabricating a chain reacting machine is of course to see to it that each fission produces a certain number of neutrons and some of these neutrons will again produce fission.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Splitting the atom is like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night and using ten million rounds of ammunition on the off chance of getting it. That should convince you that the atom will always be a sink of energy and never a reservoir of energy.

Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.

France generates a significant part of its energy requirements from fission reactors and these have achieved a perfect safety record. We build ours all differently.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.