Dark Sun Quotes

“Don't ask me who's the father of the H-bomb, because nobody is.... The whole thing was a matter of people putting ideas into a pot around a coffee cable. Somebody had an idea and that doesn't work, but they give me an idea, but that doesn't work, but you can give me an idea. Because they were beating one idea against another around a table, in front of a black board and so on. It wasn't anybody's real invention; it was just a lot of people working on it.... Eventually an idea appeared, which looked as if it might work, and for which the technology for the (primary) was reasonably available. Not completely, but could be gotten together pretty fast if you put some more work on that.... It's a very complicated technical question.”
― Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

“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