Jews From Germany

"In other words, whenever we capitalize a notion and, in the English language, even change the gender from neuter to feminine, we actually are "haloing" the word or the notion and are indicating its sempiternity as an idea or power."

"In late antique art, we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might impersonate a supra-individual idea or general notion. This special mark of distinction indicated that the figure was meant to represent in every respect a continuum, something permanent and sempiternal beyond the contingencies of time and corruption."

"That the phrase actually originated in the Hispana is obvious for a simple reason: only in that collection do we find a textual corruption of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon at which one of the bishops modestly said that God imperatorem erexit ad zelum [i.e. fidei]. In other words, a scribe copying the canons of Chalcedon misread the text and changed ad zelum into ad celum; and this erroneous reading must have reached, perhaps through the channels of Pseudo-Isidorus, the Norman Anonymous for whom even that great forgery in favor of the hierarchy could turn into grist brought to his royalist mill. This reading is merely an error, though an error remarkable by itself, since it shows how easily any extravagant exaltation of the imperial power could flow from the pen of a scribe in those centuries."

"Nothing succeeds like success; children who opt out of school have had a continued record of failure, and it would be difficult to blame the children themselves for voting with their feet and playing truant as much as possible. This failure is not necessary; it is imposed on the children by inappropriate methods of teaching which do not take into account the innate patterns of abilities of these children. A return to sanity is long overdue; we must pay close attention to the genetic basis of our children`s abilities."

"The social problems that arise, arise from the facts, not our investigation of these facts."

"It would be very peculiar if a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complexities, learn quickly, and benefit from experience, did not have very important implications."

"Modern education does no favour to the children it is supposed to teach when it de-emphasizes facts; although facts are not the only important things in life, in science, and in the arts, they nevertheless constitute the absolutely essential substructure without which nothing worthwhile can be built."

"If the reader does not like some of the facts that emerge, I hope against hope that he will not blame me for their existence."

"[W]hat is new in his theories is not true, and what is true in his theories is not new."

"[R]oughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not."

"[T]he American Government is in fact enforcing a system of employment on the universities under which they are required, under pain of bankruptcy, to employ members of minority groups in spite of the fact that a better qualified member of a non-minority group is applying for the job...Quotas were considered undesirable when they were used against minority groups; they do not become desirable when they are used against majority groups. Positive discrimination, so called, is still discrimination against somebody; one man`s positive discrimination is another man`s negative discrimination. Furthermore, who shall define a minority?...Why are some minorities more minor than others?"

"What you read in the newspapers, hear on the radio and see on television, is hardly even the truth as seen by experts; it is the wishful thinking of journalists, seen through filters of prejudice and ignorance."

"There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate."

"I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts."

"They bought research as they bought vegetables - a wonderful insight into official thinking about science."

"Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they have specialized, are just as ordinary, pigheaded and unreasonable as anybody else."

"I didn’t care about overtime. I didn’t care about how much money it cost me. I wanted to get the thing right. So I never rushed musiciansinto the studio and rushed them out. When we went into overtime,which was double for everybody and triple for the leader—forget all this, lets [sic] make the records, right? The musicians didn't just do it for the money. They wanted it right too. They listened to the playbacks and they'd say if something wasn't quite right, and go back and do it again."

"[M]y father was an architect. He and my mother separated when I was young, but before that I went with them to Russia, where he had an assignment; then World War I broke out, and he was arrested and sent to Siberia. My mother and I had a terrible journey back, on an ice-cold train, first to Paris, eventually home."

"I used to go skating regularly in Berlin. One day, I went to the skating rink and found I was there on the wrong day; instead of skating, they had a show. I thought I might as well stay, so I put my skates over my shoulders and went in. The show starred Sam Wooding accompanying the Chocolate Kiddies Revue; he had a 8- or 10-piece band, and I was totally fascinated."

"The ship took a long way around, via the Caribbean. A West Indian cricket player befriended me, and I began to sit at his table. From that point on, I noticed that the white passengers began treating me very strangely. Finally, one of them said: "We don't do that you know. Don't socialize with those people." That was my first encounter with segregation."

"It IS an undeniable fact that no philosophy outside India makes such a varied and manifold use of[spiritual] instruction in order to visualize the supreme Truth. It is the very metaphysical bent of Hindu thought which makes room for practical educational training."

"At about this same time Dirac wrote a paper that proposed a general theory of how measurements should be described in quantum mechanics. Similar work was also done by P. Jordan in Göttingen. These two papers constitute what is called transformation theory, because they show how one can transform information gained by measuring one quantity into predicting information about another."

"An important episode for my understanding of conduction problems arose from a paper by Kretschmann, ... who attacked the then accepted theory of conductivity and claimed that the basis of the papers by Bloch and others was quite wrong. He had a number of objections which were mostly not very well conceived, but he claimed, in particular, that in the usual derivation of the Boltzmann equation one had made unjustified use of perturbation theory. In trying to defend the theory I therefore set out to prove that perturbation theory was in order, and to my amazement I found that this was very questionable, if not exactly for the reasons given by Kretschmann. It appeared that the usual application of Fermi's 'golden rule' depended on the inequality ħ/τ ≪ kT, where τ is the collision time. This was not satisfied for many metals. Indeed Landau's dimensional analysis made them comparable. ..."

"After the war, Bethe went back to Cornell, where he helped build an outstanding research center in high-energy physics. Peierls returned to Birmingham, where he created the outstanding school of theoretical physics in Western Europe. The two physicists established a pipeline between the two institutions and offered their generous evaluations of the young postdocs and colleagues—Hugh McManus, Edwin Salpeter, Stuart Butler, Richard Dalitz, Freeman Dyson, and others—that they sent to one another. Their correspondence likewise gives perceptive overviews of advances in high-energy physics, especially of the progress made after 1955 in the nuclear many-body problem on which Bethe was concentrating. Their letters also concern policy challenges posed by, for example, the cold war, nuclear weaponry, nuclear test ban treaties, and antiballistic missiles."

"Born approximation is a familiar and convenient approximation in handling scattering problems. It is adequate, or at least informative, in so many cases that we tend to develop the habit of using its first-order term without always checking the conditions for its applicability."

"The atoms which constitute a solid consist of nuclei and electrons. For a description of the state of the solid it is not, however, necessary to specify the state of all the Z electrons of each atom, since we can eliminate most or all of them by a principle that is familiar from the theory of molecules. ... Since the atomic nuclei are much heavier than the electrons, they move much more slowly, and it is therefore reasonable to start from the approximation in which they are taken to be taken to be at rest, though not necessarily in the regular positions."

"Any theoretical physicist has met, in his introduction to the subject, the simplest examples of Schrödinger's equation, including the harmonic oscillator. In demonstrating its solution, it is usually shown that for energies satisfying the usual quantum condition, E = (n + ½)ħω (1.1.1) where n is a non-negative integer and ω the frequency, the equation has a solution satisfying the correct boundary conditions. It is equally important to know that these are the only solutions, i.e., that for an energy not equal to (1.1.1) no admissible solution exists. This negative statement is not usually proved in elementary treatments, or else it is deduced from quite elaborate discussions of the convergence and behavior of a certain infinite series. It is therefore surprising to find that the result can be seen without any complicated algebra."

"1.4 Types of binding ... The most important types of force are as follows: (a) Electrostatic forces. In an ionic crystal the attraction is mainly due to the Coulomb interaction between point charges. This is particularly amenable to calculation, and a great deal of work has been done on it. The force is a 'two-body' force, i.e. the interaction between two given ions is independent of the positions of any other ions that may be present. ... (b) Van der Waals forces. This name describes the effect that a neutral and isotropic atom can acquire a polarization under the influence of an electric field, and even two neutral isotropic atoms will induce small dipole moments in each other, due to the fluctuating moments which they possess because of the existence of virtual excited states. ... (c) Homopolar binding. These are forces like those effective in homopolar molecules, and we know they are due to the exchange of electrons between the atoms. In molecular crystals (H2, Cl2, etc.) these bonds can easily be localized and we can start from a description of the molecular by the methods of quantum chemistry and then add the relatively weak forces between different molecules. In other cases, however, such as diamond or graphite, each atom shares some valence electrons with each of its neighbors, and it is therefore not possible to single out any given groups of atoms that may be regarded as chemically saturated. The quantitative discussion of such forces is not easy. ... (d) Overlap. If two atoms approach so closely that their electron shells overlap, then there is a strong repulsive force between them. ... (e) Metallic bond. ... it is worth noting that in the case of a metal the presence and motion of the conduction electrons is an important factor in holding the crystal together and in determining its structure."

"It is Rudi's genius to show the reader in concrete terms how to do the predicting after some organized thinking."

"His contributions to condensed matter physics were largely on fundamental questions, establishing the principles of this subject. Most of this work was done during the years 1928–37, but much of it could not be tested until the experimental techniques needed for this had become sufficiently developed. ... Rudolf Peierls's work in nuclear physics began in 1933, when James Chadwick challenged him and Hans Bethe to explain his first measurements of the cross-section for photo-disintegration of the deuteron. Peierls's experience in this field developed rapidly within the next few years, on both practical questions and academic research, to the point where he and Otto Frisch could confidently conclude that the construction of an atomic bomb would be quite possible using 235U, which could be obtained obtained from natural uranium by a feasible separation process, and they pointed this out in the famous Frisch-Peierls Memorandum of 1940 which they sent to the British government. This led to the Atomic Bomb Project, at first in Britain under the name "Tube Alloys Project" and later in USA as the "Manhattan District Project", which many of the UK scientists, including both Peierls and Frisch, were sent to join at the end of 1943."

"Richard Dalitz, in: (quote from page v)"

"With both light and electrons, one was faced with the so-called "wave-particle duality"; both could be regarded as waves for some purposes and as particles for others. An important step in resolving this paradox was a paper by Max Born in July 1926, in which he suggested that the waves determine the probability of finding the particle in a particular place. This idea was already considered much earlier by Einstein, but it was rejected by him. This interpretation of the theory was further developed in the spring of 1927 by Heisenberg, who formulated his "uncertainty principle" ..."

"When I arrived in Leipzig, Heisenberg was working on the theory of ferromagnetism. It was known the magnetism of such substances as iron was due to the "spin" of the electrons inside the substance. Each electron spins like a little top, and in the iron there is a "molecular field", a force that tends to align the spin of each electron with that of its neighbors. But the nature of this field was unknown. It could not be a magnetic effect because magnetic forces are much too weak to account for the observed behaviour. Heisenberg saw that the answer lay in the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that no two electrons can be in exactly the same state. Thus two electrons with the same spin orientation keep out of each other's way; while this repulsion may increase their energy of motion, it diminishes their mutual repulsion, and can therefore lead to a decrease in total energy, making the parallel alignment of the electron spins energetically favourable. He had encountered this mechanism in the theory of atomic spectra and concluded that it was also responsible for ferromagnetism."

"I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me. And neither of us liked what we saw."

"I foretell the future. I predict the past. I don't need a crystal ball; a football, a tennis ball, a moth ball, any old ball will do. When the power is upon me, there is no holding me back, I just let loose and prophesy all over the place."

"Lately, I've become quite involved in psychic vibrations. I vibrate whenever I get the chance."

"I never answer my telephone unless it rings."

"I am squirming with delight to meet an intellectual colossus."

"Years and years of marriage prepared me for years and years of divorce."

"If only the Earth would open and swallow you up."

"I find it hard to sit still in one spot, and impossible to sit still in two spots."

"My name, as you may have guessed, is Theodore. I come from a strange stock. The members of my family were mostly epileptics, vegetarians, stutterers, triplets, nailbiters. But we've always been happy."

"Ladies and gentlemen, I resent this applause."

"My mumsie and my popsie both died years before I was born, and my sister and my uncle were identical twins, which is probably more than you can say for yourself."

"I am what you might call a controversial figure: people either hate me or despise me."

"As long as there is death, there is hope. The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young."

"All our great spiritual leaders are dead. Moses is dead, Muhammad is dead, Buddha is dead, the Reverend Jim Jones is dead, and I'm not feeling so hot myself!"

"Only what we have lost forever, we possess forever. Only where there are graves, are there resurrections. Only when we have drunk from the river of darkness, shall we truly see. Only when our legs have rotted off, shall we truly dance."

"Total war necessitates total espionage. The leadership of a country must be capable of finding out about and calculating the entire force of resistance of in opponents, military and otherwise."

"The thing that strikes you most: there is very little war news in German-controlled papers. There are, to be sure, all the notices of promotions: the new generals, the new commanders. There are also items listing decorations conferred for some distinguished service or other. And there are a lot of what they call in Europe feuilletons, colorful and gossipy essays or think pieces which have to do with the war. But there is precious little news. There are some very good reportages on the life at the front or in U-boats or in bombers, and some good photos. The Germans were always good at that. But when it comes down to actual information, if you really want to know something—you don’t get much."