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Book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Quotes of Book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb
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  1. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    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, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice sounded surprised.
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  2. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    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}
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  3. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    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.
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  4. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. "A chemist's nightmare," the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then "a physicist's nightmare." "Not exactly," Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together:'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe something was wrong. "What's the matter?"I looked at him and said, "Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?"This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, "That's about it.
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  5. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    {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.
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  6. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    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.
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  7. Richard Rhodes _ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

    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.
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