Few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.
Another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
An excessive and unproductive deference of British physics students to their seniors. He therefore founded a club, the
What decided him (almost invariably) was a college project in which he had occasion to do some independent research—to find out things for himself. Once he discovered the pleasures of this kind of wor...
Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterr...
This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.
The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer’s vocabulary—Fermi was only then inventing that specialty—but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded c...
The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man. The fire storm at...
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...
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council’s plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 193...
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...
Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century because increasingly efficient killing technologies made the extreme exercise of national sovereignty pathological.
Less obviously, the resurgence of capital punishment in modern America exposes the insecurity of U.S. authorities with the increase in violent crime, which challenges government monopoly of violence.
Kapitza Club, devoted to open and unhierarchical discussion. Membership was limited and coveted. Members met in college rooms and
I try not to speak more clearly than I think.
Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, howeve...
Einstein was arguing against quantum theory just as irrationally as his opponents had argued against relativity theory. Einstein remained adamant (he remained adamant to the end of his life where quan...
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...
But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
American scientist in his prime: He is likely to have been a sickly child or to have lost a parent at an early age. He has a very high I.Q. and in boyhood began to do a great deal of reading. He tende...