Skip to content

We were able to discover two new kinds of atomic species, one was hydrogen of mass 3, unknown until that time, and the other helium of mass 3, also unknown.

— Mark Oliphant Portraits in Science interviews (1994)

Another quote →

More quotes by Mark Oliphant

I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use.

Portraits in Science interviews (1994)

I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them.

Of course, we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.

Portraits in Science interviews (1994)

I was a member of a group that was led by Niels Bohr…that was very much opposed to the use of this new weapon on civilian cities…we were in a minority, but a rather distinguished minority.

All Mark Oliphant quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mark Oliphant (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.