Fission Quotes

• The fundamental point in fabricating a chain reacting machine is of course to see to it that each fission produces a certain number of neutrons and some of these neutrons will again produce fission.

  Enrico Fermi

  Numbers, Ties, Machines

  Enrico Fermi, James W. Cronin (2004). “Fermi Remembered”, p.75, University of Chicago Press

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• Nearly all of our existing power sources are generators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, and gas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and even our nuclear fission utility power plants.

  Wilson Greatbatch

  Oil, Nuclear, Coal

  Wilson Greatbatch (2000). “The Making of the Pacemaker: Celebrating a Lifesaving Invention”

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• France generates a significant part of its energy requirements from fission reactors and these have achieved a perfect safety record. We build ours all differently.

  Wilson Greatbatch

  Safety, Perfect, Energy

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• Rocket scientists agree that we have about reached the limit of our ability to travel in space using chemical rockets. To achieve anything near the speed of light we will need a new energy source and a new propellant. Nuclear fission is not an option.

  Wilson Greatbatch

  Travel, Light, Space

  Wilson Greatbatch (2000). “The Making of the Pacemaker: Celebrating a Lifesaving Invention”

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• The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

  Erich Fromm

  Science, Successful, Men

  1955 The Sane Society.

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• No-one really thought of fission before its discovery.

  Lise Meitner

  Science, Thinking, Discovery

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• It was my responsibility that this world got itself an atom bomb, because there were only a handful of nuclear physicists in the thirties - only a handful. And we were all beating the desk and saying "How wonderful it will be if we discover atomic fission."

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Responsibility, Atoms, Nuclear

  "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health". Book by L. Ron Hubbard, 1950.

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• Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

  James Buchan

  Technology, Nuclear, Zeppelins

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• O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each.

  Lise Meitner

  Xenon, Science, Simple

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• In the design of fission reactors man was not an innovator but an unwitting imitator of nature.

  George Cowan

  Science, Men, Design

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• Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.

  Bill Gates

  People, Nuclear, Safe

  "THE BILL GATES INTERVIEW: An energy miracle is coming, and it's going to change the world". Interview with Drake Baer, www.businessinsider.com. February 22, 2016.

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• You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Men, Conquer, Propaganda

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.318, Macmillan

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• The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.

  Marya Mannes

  Weapons, Barbarians, Fusion

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• When God speaks, when the Word speaks, energy is translated into matter. What is atomic fission? It is matter translated back into energy—poof! it disappears. Creation began with energy. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.

  J. Vernon McGee

  Energy, Matter, Speak

  J. Vernon McGee (1984). “Genesis through Revelation: 5 Volumes Genesis - Revelation”, p.5897, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Men, Mind, Bombs

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.318, Macmillan

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• The technologists claim that if everything works [in a nuclear fission reactor] according to their blueprints, fission energy will be a safe and very attractive solution to the energy needs of the world. ... The real issue is whether their blueprints will work in the real world and not only in a "technological paradise."... Opponents of fission energy point out a number of differences between the real world and the "technological paradise." ... No acts of God can be permitted.

  Hannes Alfven

  Real, Science, Differences

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• Divorce: fission after fusion.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Divorce, Fusion

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• Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

  Edward Teller

  Science, Technology, Discovery

  Edward Teller, Judith Schoolery (2009). “Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics”, p.42, Basic Books

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• When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Stars, Order, Energy

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• One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free- -but one-third is the victim of cruel repression--and the other one- third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.

  John F. Kennedy

  Envy, Energy, Atoms

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• Modern thinking is that time did not start with the big bang, and that there was a multiverse even before the big bang. In the inflation theory, and in string theory, there were universes before our big bang, and that big bangs are happening all the time. Universes are formed when bubbles collide or fission into smaller bubles.

  Michio Kaku

  Thinking, Bangs, Modern

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• Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.

  Timothy Leary

  Christian, Order, Civilization

  Timothy Leary (2001). “Your Brain Is God”, p.90, Ronin Publishing

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• We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.

  Rob Delaney

  Years, Space, People

  Rob Delaney (2013). “Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.”, p.35, Hachette UK

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• It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

  Mary McCarthy

  Space, Hydrogen Bomb, People

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The humanist in the bathtub”

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• Most of us do not understand nuclear fission, but we accept it. I don't understand television, but I accept it. I don't understand radio, but every week my voice goes out around the world, and I accept it. Why is it so easy to accept all these man-made miracles and so difficult to accept the miracles of the Bible?

  Billy Graham

  Faith, Men, Voice

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