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Richard Rhodes QUOTES

1 " For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

2 " The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day.

[Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.] "

― Richard Rhodes , Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems and the Human World

3 " Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

4 " Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

5 " The world is full of terrible suffering, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea. "

― Richard Rhodes , A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood

6 " Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements. "

― Richard Rhodes , Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems and the Human World

7 " If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle. "

― Richard Rhodes

8 " [Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

9 " We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we know every rule, however . . . what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

10 " When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy. "

― Richard Rhodes , Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Richard Rhodes QUOTES

11 " 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, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was “very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?” As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

12 " Consistent with Martin Klaproth’s inspiration in 1789 to link his discovery of a new element with the recent discovery of the planet Uranus and with McMillan’s suggestion to extend the scheme to Neptune, Seaborg would name element 94 for Pluto, the ninth planet outward from the sun, discovered in 1930 and named for the Greek god of the underworld, a god of the earth’s fertility but also the god of the dead: plutonium. * "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

13 " 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 city. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

14 " Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society. "

― Richard Rhodes , Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

15 " 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 peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

16 " 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. “Seeing all these complications of analysis, I was dumbfounded, fearing I would never be able to contribute anything.” But the equations stayed on the board from day to day, which meant to Ulam that the pace of invention was relatively slow, and he soon regained confidence.1340 “I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situations, rather than a merely logical picture of the problems. "

― Richard Rhodes , Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

17 " 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. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

18 " Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation, brutally resolving their worst disputes. Now an ultimate power had appeared. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

19 " In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war. "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb

20 " the process of writing is always a healing process because the function of creation is always, always, the alleviation of pain—the writer’s, first of all, and then the pain of those who read what she has written. Imagination is compassionate. Writing is a form of making, and making humanizes the world.1 "

― Richard Rhodes , How to Write: Advice and Reflections