Home > Work > Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
1 " With only rare exceptions, history shows that while strategy and bravery can win a battle, the frontiers of science and technology must be exploited to win a war. "
― Neil deGrasse Tyson , Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
2 " America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space, riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, "but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved. "
― Avis Lang , Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
3 " ...exploration is hardly ever motivated by the desire to explore. Part the curtains of curiosity, and you'll find individuals hungry for political, cultural, or economic dominion funding the expedition. "
4 " Space exploration may pull in the talent, but war pays the bills. "
5 " Brick walls are opaque to our eyes, but to microwaves those walls are transparent, which is why we can talk on our cell phones while indoors. "
6 " Einstein himself, acutely aware of the world’s newfound capacity for annihilation, said in a 1949 interview in Liberal Judaism, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. "
7 " If you don’t have a dream, you can’t have a dream come true, "
8 " America will aim no higher than the creation and aggressive marketing of minor consumer products that replace similar, and perfectly satisfactory, consumer products. “America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space,” riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, “but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved. "
9 " The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs. "
10 " Since everything warmer than absolute zero radiates heat, detecting infrared at a distance means, in principle, detecting everything. "
11 " Noise” includes any unwanted signal that contaminates the target of measurement. "
12 " Among the many spots used by philosophers and astronomers over the centuries to mark the meridian for zero degrees longitude were Ferro, in the Canary Islands; Ujjain, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh; the “agonic line” (a line along which true north and magnetic north coincide, but not forever) that passed through the Azores; the Paris Observatory; the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; the White House; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. "
13 " The former pair offered physics and logic; the latter offered primarily politics and fear plus a "
14 " So by looking in X-rays, you are seeing aspects of nature which we did not even suspect existed but which are very important in the formation, evolution, and dynamics of the structures in the universe. "
15 " Incidentally, gamma rays and a myriad of subatomic particles are generated by the collision of superhigh-energy cosmic rays with Earth’s atmosphere. Within this cascade lurks striking evidence of time dilation, a feature of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Cosmic-ray particles move through space at upward of 99.5 percent the speed of light. When they slam into the top of Earth’s atmosphere, they break down into many subproducts, each with less and less energy per particle, forming an avalanche of elementary particles that descend toward Earth’s surface. "
16 " But because the particle shower moves so fast relative to us and our detectors on Earth’s surface, the muons experience the passage of time more slowly than we do. "
17 " If you travel fast, several weird things happen. One is that your inner time clock will appear to tick more slowly, as seen by all those who observe you. Your time “dilates. "
18 " Nowadays our mobile phones relay microwaves. "
19 " Detecting without seeing was now a scientific reality. "
20 " Some species of snakes have small pits on their heads that pick up infrared rays from tasty warm-blooded prey, readily revealed at night against the rapidly cooling surroundings "
