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...
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...
About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.
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...
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...
Time: 0529:45. The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at thirty-two detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonatio...
There are those about us who say that such research should be stopped by law, alleging that man's destructive powers are already large enough. [...] There is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is availab...
Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. It is no exaggeration to say, reports the Japanese study, that the whole city was ruined instantaneously.2679 Materia...
It was not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one's native land and sees that one has been abandoned. - Antheil
But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane b...
Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is the gradual removal of prejudices.
And most generally and profoundly: The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.
Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement, and I therefore think that action should be taken in the sense proposed by Lor...
When he thundered up the steep staircase [of the institute], two steps at a time, there were few of us younger ones that could keep pace with him. The peace of the library was often broken by a brisk...
They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening. Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of...
The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was a far deeper interferen...
The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous, he challenged the army commanders. Every war costs blood, and the smell of blo...
The history professor Lifton interviewed is similarly at a loss: I climbed Hikiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared. . . . I was shocked by the sight. . . . What I felt then...