Destructive Power Quotes
This quotation was used throughout American history. See Oliver Wendell Holmes {603715}, Daniel Webster {37299}. Maurice L. Duplessis of Canada had a contrary variant: {600341}.
he cupped his two hands Fermi was the scientist who organized and planned the first controlled nuclear chain reaction
Bryan participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. He had written this for his summary to the jury, but the summaries were dispensed with when it was obvious that Scopes would be convicted. He had admitted to breaking the law, but the law itself was on trial.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is Lord Acton’s observation about power. See {292904}. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems.
Breslin was criticized in a Federal report for his alarmist news coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap:
He anticipated smart bombs and missiles, drones, and cyber warfare. However, 25 years earlier, he observed the technology of defense and thought attacks might never again be feasible. See {626740}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
The lecture was on radium and the radioactivity that scientists had recently discovered. This appears to be the first time a scientist suggested the possibility of using atomic energy to produce a powerful weapon. At the same time, note that he also mentioned the possible destruction of the earth. “Heavy matter” referred to the elements—many of which had not yet been discovered—that had larger atomic numbers than radium like uranium.
