Emilio Segrè

Emilio Gino Segrè (1 February 1905 – 22 April 1989) was an Italian-American nuclear physicist and radiochemist who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959, along with Owen Chamberlain.

Quotes

• In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two.
  • Epigraph in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) p. 8

Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1970)

University of Chicago Press

If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb.

• I remember having listened to Fermi’s discussions on hydrodynamics with von Neumann. (These took the strange form of competitions before Fermi’s office blackboard as each tried to solve the problem under study first; von Neumann, with his unmatched lightning-fast analytical skill, usually won).
  • p. 140

• In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many....Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.
  • p. 149

• If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb.
  • p. 149

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Emilio Segrè on Wikipedia