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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).

— Emilio Segrè Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1970)

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More quotes by Emilio Segrè

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.

Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1970)

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.

Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1970)

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.

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