Quotes About Discovery

What decided him (almost invariably) was a college project in which he had occasion to do some independent research—to find out things for himself. Once he discovered the pleasures of this kind of work, he never turned back. He is completely satisfied with his chosen vocation. . . . He works hard and devotedly in his laboratory, often seven days a week.

The discovery of slow-neutron radioactivity meant that Fermi's group had to work its way through the elements again looking for different and enhanced half-lives—which is to say, different isotopes and decay products.

On February 27, 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature, physicist James Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford's laboratory, announced the possible existence of a neutron.

Silliman had struck oil—oil suitable for lighting.

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.

to estimating gas volume based on geological models. Major discoveries—the Panhandle Field in 1918 in North Texas, the Hugoton Field in 1922 around the conjunction of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—eased early concerns about premature depletion. Panhandle and Hugoton together accounted for about 16 percent of total twentieth-century US natural-gas reserves, some 117 trillion cubic feet.

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.

That discovery gave Oersted the law he was looking for, because the needle's positional reversal could mean only that the magnetic field which the electric current generated filled the space adjacent to the wire in circular form around it.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted's discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar's death in 1825.

Oersted's discovery that an electrified wire generated a magnetic field around it drew Faraday to search for the reverse phenomenon: electricity induced in a wire wrapped around a magnet. When that experiment failed—he was one of many who tried it—he began a long series of experiments trying every conceivable arrangement of wires and magnets.

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.

In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality.

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.

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.

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.

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

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden.

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.

Stanley decided in 1892 to find out if there were limitations on the level of high-voltage power that could be transmitted.

Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. "The pile has gone critical," he announced. No one present had any doubt about it.

He waited another minute, then another, and then when it seemed that the anxiety was too much to bear, he ordered 'ZIP in!' Ã¢â'¬Â It was 3:53 P.M. Fermi had run the pile for 4.5 minutes at one-half watt and brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus.