Birth: September 2, 1877 Death: September 22, 1956
There has been no discovery like it in the history of man. It puts into man's hands the key to using the fundamental energy of the universe..
[The human control of atomic energy could] virtually provide anyone who wanted it with a private sun of his own..
On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries..
But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance..
The fact remains that, if the supply of energy failed, modern civilization would come to an end as abruptly as does the music of an organ deprived of….
The dropping of the Atomic Bomb is a very deep problem... Instead of commemorating Hiroshima we should celebrate... man's triumph over the problem [o….
Heat energy of uniform temperature [is] the ultimate fate of all energy. The power of sunlight and coal, electric power, water power, winds and tides….
Innumerable entirely new compounds have been produced in the last century. The artificial dye-stuffs, prepared from materials occurring in coal-tar, ….
Man cannot influence in this respect the atomic forces of Nature..
The energy available for each individual man is his income, and the philosophy which can teach him to be content with penury should be capable of tea….
Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful..
In so far as such developments utilise the natural energy running to waste, as in water power, they may be accounted as pure gain. But in so far as t….
It is probable that all heavy matter possesses - latent and bound up with the structure of the atom - a similar quantity of energy to that possessed ….
The laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are, however, not solely of importance in pure science. They necessarily come first in or….
Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess ….
The ruling passion of the age is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it - to convert wealth that perishes i….
An honest money system is the only alternative..
The real value of science is in the getting, and those who have tasted the pleasure of discovery alone know what science is. A problem solved is dead….
With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of ….
There is something sublime about its aloofness from and its indifference to its external environment..
An inexplicable fact is infinitely preferable to an incomprehensible mystery..