Lise Meitner famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.
-- Lise Meitner

#Science #Reality #Order
I love physics with all my heart ... It is a kind of personal love, as one has for a person to whom one is grateful for many things.
-- Lise Meitner

#Grateful #Heart #Kind
You must not blame us scientists for the use which war technicians have put our discoveries.
-- Lise Meitner

#War #Discovery #Use
I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.]
-- Lise Meitner

#Bombs #Manhattan #Scientist
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

#Simple #Order #Two
The life must not be easy if it is only rich in contents
-- Lise Meitner

#Rich #Easy
No-one really thought of fission before its discovery.
-- Lise Meitner

#Discovery #Fission
Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.
-- Lise Meitner

#Needs #Easy #Empty
I will have nothing to do with a bomb!
-- Lise Meitner

#Bombs

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.
But it would be absolutely mistaken to regard a wealth of theoretical knowledge as characteristic proof for the qualities and abilities of a leader.
Whether statistics be an art or a science... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.
We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.
There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.
I'd like to set things straight, a few more people should be pulling their weight.
Action is the only reality; not only reality, but morality as well.
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
The search for safety takes its clearest form... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.

Lise Meitner famous quotes

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