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...
Germany had been united in empire for only eight years when Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He grew up in Munich. He was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studie...
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...
Bohr’s office, borrowed from Albert Einstein. It was spacious, with leaded windows, a fireplace, a large blackboard, an Oriental rug to warm the floor.1089
The end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a st...
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...
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 b...
The concoction of the Protocols was probably the work of the head of the czarist secret police outside Russia, a Paris-based agent named Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Borrowing and paraphrasing Machiave...
Roosevelt had returned from Hyde Park troubled that Felix Frankfurter and Bohr had somehow breached Manhattan Project security, Bush and perhaps Conant had talked to Bohr and the two administrators ha...
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...
In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word unconditional was discussed but not included in the official joint statement...
In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative...
Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, tr...
Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.
A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.
What mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satis...
There are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.
Products. The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread...
Physicists were almost all either first-born sons or eldest sons. Theoretical physicists averaged the highest verbal IQ’s among all scientists studied, clustering around 170, almost 20 percent higher...
Mid-June 1915, the wind was favourable and we discharged a very poisonous gas, a mixture of chlorine and phosgene, against the [Russian] enemy lines. . . .344 Not a single shot was fired. . . . The at...