“We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
“The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]” — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom. — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
“The bow of the Carpathians as they curve around northwestward begins to define the northern border of Czechoslovakia. Long before it can complete that service the bow bends down toward the Austrian Alps, but a border region of mountainous uplift, the Sudetes, continues across Czechoslovakia. Some sixty miles beyond Prague it turns southwest to form a low range between Czechoslovakia… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
“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… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
“In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter.” — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
I've puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I've identified its source: It's their self-talk. We all talk to… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
“Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
“The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence,… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
“Chaim Weizmann gives some measure of that totality in the harsher world of the Russian Pale when he writes that “the acquisition of knowledge… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Rhodes Copy Share
