Physicist James Franck, head of the physics department at Haber’s institute, who, like Haber and Hahn, would later win the Nobel Prize.342 So did a crowd of industrial chemists employed by I.G. Farben...
On his first visit to the Los Alamos Tech Area, when he had encountered von Neumann discussing theory with dark, intense Edward Teller, the tremendously long formulae on the blackboard had scared him....
Another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
Robert Oppenheimer thus acquired for Los Alamos what Leo Szilard had not been able to organize in Chicago: scientific freedom of speech. The price the new community paid, a social but more profoundly...
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...
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
In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a co...
Giving such violent caretakers second chances, as social workers and judges frequently do, with the best of intentions—attributing their violence to poverty or racial prejudice and propping them up wi...
Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering...
Dr. Oppenheimer pointed out that the immediate concern had been to shorten the war. The research that had led to this development had only opened the door to future discoveries. Fundamental knowledge...
Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.
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 simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.
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...
Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that ev...
Not testosterone per se but the patriarchal preference for subjecting males to violentization, and their physical advantage in achieving early successful violent performances, explains why men are muc...
Not even his most important discovery kept Fermi from going home for lunch.
Kapitza Club, devoted to open and unhierarchical discussion. Membership was limited and coveted. Members met in college rooms and