On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen Bombs - with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons - collided midair with a refuel...
We humans may think of ourselves as solid objects, all flesh and bone. But take a close look, and it’s clear our bodies are composed largely of oxygen and hydrogen. We are essentially ephemeral – akin as much to wind water, and fire as to earth.
Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whethe...
On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says no...
Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes det...
Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the ...
Major T. J. "King" Kong: Stay on the bomb run, boys! I'm gonna get them doors open if it harelips ever'body on Bear Creek!
There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.
I like the name Atomic Kitten. It's so great.
In nature there is no death, Only a reshuffling of atoms.
We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we trans...
M: You've got a bloody cheek! James Bond: Sorry. I'll shoot the camera first next time. M: Or yourself. You stormed into an Embassy. You violated the only absolutely inviolate rule of international relations, and why? So you could kill a nobody. We w...
Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.
Nothing is forever. Except atoms.
The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.
Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the onl...
I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-o...
Can there be a completely different set of laws of physics in a different universe, or do the laws of physics as we understand them hold true in all possible universes? If the answer is that a different set of laws can operate in a different universe...
As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so ...
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one mak...
's standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit...