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21 " 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 available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbour (Aston in 1936) "
― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb
22 " British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight. "
23 " The physics faculty of the University of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, "
24 " Science grew out of the craft tradition "
25 " informal system of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more recent system of the European graduate school. "
26 " Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. "
27 " Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein’s personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein’s own terms. God does not throw dice? “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”502 "
28 " two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate’s work. "
29 " He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf. Afterward the Nobel Foundation recast them and returned them to their owners. "
30 " A.E.G., the German General Electric, signed Szilard on as a paid consultant and actually built one of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators, but the magnetic pump was so noisy compared to even the noisy conventional compressors of the day that it never left the engineering lab. "
31 " So Fermi said, “Well . . . there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made.” Rabi said, “What do you mean by ‘remote possibility’?” and Fermi said, “Well, ten per cent.” Rabi said, “Ten per cent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that I might die, and it’s ten percent, I get excited about it. "
32 " trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record. "
33 " The practice of science was not itself a science; it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed. "
34 " The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. "
35 " 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, a cartel of eight chemical companies assembled in wartime by the energetic Carl Duisberg of Bayer. "
36 " scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them. "
37 " 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 satisfied. "
38 " 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 uglier effects on morals of losing a major war. "
39 " another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war. "
40 " Consider Rutherford playing his thoroughly unlikely hunch about alpha backscattering, Heisenberg remembering an obscure remark of Einstein’s and concluding that nature only performed in consonance with his mathematics, Lawrence flipping compulsively through obscure foreign journals: Were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. "