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September 9 - October 28, 2023
Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.
“They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘Do you really mean to say that you think that [Minister] of the Interior [Hermann Göring] had anything to do with this?’ and I said, ‘Yes, this is precisely what I mean.’
This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”
The Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service was promulgated throughout Germany on April 7 and thousands of Jewish scholars and scientists lost their positions in German universities.
No more could you learn science, because nothing in science ever quite fits; no experiment is ever final proof; everything is simplified and approximate.
Learning the feel of proof; learning judgment; learning which hunches to play; learning which stunning calculations to rework, which experimental results not to trust: these skills admitted you to the spectators’ benches at the chess game of the gods, and acquiring them required sitting first at the feet of a master.
“Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense.
by the complete openness of their communication, an absolute and vital freedom of speech—scientists
“The authority of scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.”
Good science, original work, always went beyond the body of received opinion, always represented a dissent from orthodoxy.
he learned the possibility and the necessity of dissent.
The first criterion was plausibility. That would eliminate crackpots and frauds. It might also (and sometimes did) eliminate ideas so original that the orthodox could not recognize them, but to work at all, science had to take that risk.
Plausibility and scientific value measured an idea’s quality by the standards of orthodoxy; originality measured the quality of its dissent.
It was becoming clear that electrons were responsible for chemical affinities between elements, that chemistry was ultimately electrical.
he held his hand between the covered tube and the screen, his hand slightly reduced the glow on the screen but in dark shadow he could see its bones.
“Only in the world of possibilities is there continuity; in the world of reality decision always comes through a breach of continuity.”
Light shone on certain metals knocks electrons free; the effect is applied today in the solar panels that power spacecraft.
But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency.
Einstein saw a quantum condition in this odd fact. He proposed the heretical possibility that light, which years of careful scientific experiment had demonstrated to travel in waves, actually traveled in small ind...
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Because original work is inherently rebellious, his paper was not only an examination of the physical world but also a political document.
Mechanistic physics had become authoritarian.
‘Yes, I would like you to do something for my people.’ . . . That was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for Jews in Palestine.”
The “famous declaration” came to be called the Balfour Declaration, a commitment by the British government in the form of a letter from Arthur Balfour to Baron Edmond de Rothschild to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
The new law abruptly stripped a quarter of the physicists of Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes, of their positions and their livelihood.676
Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.
A scientist could choose to help or not to help build nuclear weapons. That was his only choice. The surrender of any further authority in the matter was the price of admission to what would grow to be a separate, secret state with separate sovereignty linked to the public state through the person and by the sole authority of the President.
‘No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.’ ”
“I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me”.
Like Bohr’s assessment in 1939, it overestimated the difficulty of isotope separation and underestimated U.S. industrial capacity.
It also, as the Japanese government had before Pearl Harbor, underestimated American dedication.
Collective dedication was a pattern of Japanese culture more than of American. But Americans could summon it when challenged, and couple it with resources of talent and...
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The bombing of Hamburg marked a significant step in the evolution of death technology itself, massed bombers deliberately churning conflagration.
(The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)
He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soothe feelings—how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.
Los Alamos’ amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it.
In Japan the impasse persisted between civilian and military leaders. To the civilians the atomic bomb looked like a golden opportunity to surrender without shame, but the admirals and the generals still despised unconditional surrender and refused to concur.
The military leaders of Japan had still not agreed to surrender.
The Japanese government learned of Byrnes’ reply to its offer of conditional surrender not long after midnight on Sunday, August 12, but civilian and military leaders continued to struggle in deadlocked debate.
The vice chief of the Japanese Navy’s general staff, the man who had conceived and promoted the kamikaze attacks of the past year that had added to American bewilderment and embitterment at Japanese ways, crashed a meeting of government leaders on the evening of August 13 with tears in his eyes to offer “a plan for certain victory”: “sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special [kamikaze] attack.”2740 Whether he meant the 20 million to attack the assembled might of the Allies with rocks or bamboo spears the record does not reveal.
