Taylor Wilson Quotes

It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.

Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.

When I was 10 years old, that nuclear spark hit me. Whatever it may be, I really don't know what it was about nuclear science, but whatever it was that triggered that interest, it stuck. I went after that one with a passion.

Fission is like kissing your wife. Fusion is like kissing your mistress.

Nuclear fission

The discovery of nuclear reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches.

By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.

There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom

There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.

The discovery that light elements could be disintegrated by artificially accelerated particles gave an additional impetus to development work on the various methods of producing them.

Leave the atom alone.

There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

Each emission of an alpha or beta ray accompanies the transmutation of an atom; the energy communicated to these rays comes from inside the atom.

Information of fundamental importance to the general problem of atomic structure has resulted from systematic studies of the cosmic radiation carried out by the Wilson cloud-chamber method.

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

I was about 10 when I got into nuclear science. That was when that spark hit me. It took a few years of research, but when I was 14, I produced my first nuclear-fusion reaction.

For the first time in history we have got more energy out of something than we put in … [but] …. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine.

By developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies.

Atoms for War and Atoms for Peace are Siamese twins.

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 by radium. If it could be tapped and controlled, what an agent it would be in shaping the world’s destiny. The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy, would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose.

There is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us .... One day man will release and control its almost infinite power.

These experiments might make it possible to produce power by means of nuclear energy and radioactive elements. Unfortunately also perhaps atomic bombs.

I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making an uranium engine, but I never thought that we would make a bomb; and at the bottom of my heart, I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb.