Emilio G. Segre Quotes

United States, Physicist
February 1, 1905 – April, 22, 1989.

Emilio Gino Segrè was an Italian-American physicist and Nobel laureate, who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. From 1943 to 1946 he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a group leader for the Manhattan Project. He found in April 1944 that Thin Man, the proposed plutonium gun-type nuclear weapon, would not work because of the presence of plutonium-240 impurities.

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.

Emilio G. Segre
She Chien-Shiung Wu is a slave driver. She is the image of the militant woman so well known in Chinese literature as either empress or mother.

Emilio G. Segre
- Mother
- Literature
- Image

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.

Emilio G. Segre
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.

Emilio G. Segre
- Different
- Build
- Bomb