Thorium was also for some years incorporated into a popular German toothpaste, Doramad. Auer, the company that made German gas mantles, also made the toothpaste.
Sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.
Consistent with Martin Klaproth’s inspiration in 1789 to link his discovery of a new element with the recent discovery of the planet Uranus and with McMillan’s suggestion to extend the scheme to Neptu...
Of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.
Collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.
Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
Today Hedy’s invention serves millions through GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS satellites, Bluetooth, cell-phone, and digital wireless systems. (illustration credit i1.23)
The subtle experimenter lost his subtlety when he shifted from doing science to proselytizing for God. Rigor slipped to Chautauqua logic and he perpetrated such howlers as the notion that Heisenberg’s...
British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight.
Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein’s personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distin...
Anne Harrington de Santana, has discerned that nuclear weapons have acquired the status of fetish objects; like the coin of the realm in relation to commodities, our glittering warheads have become ma...
84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians and teachers, although a minority of experimentalists were farmers’ sons.
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.
Rent a gram of radium for a minimum of three months for $125 a month.
The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The product...
The English were the first to expel the Jews entirely. The Jews of England belonged to the Crown, which had systematically extracted their wealth through a special Exchequer to the Jews. By 1290 it ha...
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.
Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life: he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.
The ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.
The energy from each bursting uranium nucleus would be sufficient to make a visible grain of sand visibly jump.