Quotes About Richard Rhodes

I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.

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.

United States crude oil production continued at the 1920 rate of about 443 million barrels, Hibbert cautioned, the domestic supply would be exhausted by 1933.

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

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.

By 1933, with a departmental budget above $2,000 a year, ten times the budget of most Italian physics departments

sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.

More than any other development, Chadwick's neutron made practical the detailed examination of the nucleus.

Early in 1945 Oak Ridge began shipping bomb-grade U235 to Los Alamos.

Chamberlain moved again to concession. "Appeasement" was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.

Richard Rhodes's exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes's insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

A scholar as authoritative as Richard Rhodes97 was still writing in 1995 that the Soviets had over forty ICBMs in 1961, ten times more than they actually had.