Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury, and so on. Our virtues and our dignity a...
During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City.896 The letter provoked comment,...
Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein’s and concluding that nature only performed in consonance wit...
Chamberlain moved again to concession. Appeasement was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.
A.E.G., the German General Electric, signed Szilard on as a paid consultant and actually built one of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators, but the magnetic pump was so noisy compared to even the noisy...
Was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the...
Two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate’s work.
Does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us—it gives information about the correlations between
A normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.
Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was e...
They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to th...
Then everyone began to wonder why he didn’t shut the pile off, Anderson continues. 1701 But Fermi was completely calm. He waited another minute, then another, and then when it seemed that the anxiety...
The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial or social life of our country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a pe...
Such a choice—to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do—is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow.
Science grew out of the craft tradition
Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Kármán, George de Hev...
Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt a terrible bereavement . . . partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would...
Mechanical proficiency and practical gadgets in America counterbalanced to an extent the beauty of Italy.
Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.
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