Enrico Fermi Quotes

I hope it won't take long. ~ Enrico Fermi

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery. ~ Enrico Fermi

The most striking impression was that of an overwhelming bright light. I had seen under similar conditions the explosion of a large amount - 100 tons - of normal explosives in the April test, and I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. Our eyes were accommodated to darkness, and thus even if the sudden light had been only normal daylight it would have appeared to us much brighter than usual, but we know from measurements that the flash of the bomb was many times brighter than the sun. In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible. ~ Emilio Segre

Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge. ~ Enrico Fermi

Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide ~ Enrico Fermi

The apparent size and age of the universe suggests that many technologically advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it." Or "Where is everybody?" The Fermi Paradox Enrico Fermi, Los Alamos, 1950 ~ Ralph Kern

When Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, he suspended the control rods from a rope tied to a balcony railing. In case something went wrong, next to the railing was stationed a distinguished physicist with an axe. This led to the probably apocryphal story that SCRAM stands for "Safety Control Rod Axe Man. ~ Anonymous

An experiment disproving a prediction is discovery. ~ Enrico Fermi

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery ~ Enrico Fermi

Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know. ~ Enrico Fermi

Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven't they come to Earth? ~ Enrico Fermi

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi. ~ Luis Walter Alvarez

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments. ~ Enrico Fermi

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%. ~ Enrico Fermi

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist ~ Enrico Fermi

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilárd, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. ...

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port altogether with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. ~ Albert Einstein

When asked what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common ؛ I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence ~ Enrico Fermi

The first law I passed in my cabinet was a law eliminating the double salary for the prime minister and the ministers. I have a salary as member of parliament. I don't want a double salary. So it was a very important decision. ~ Enrico Letta

As the result of some observations I have made in recent years, I propose to add two new and previously undescribed varieties to the various forms of insanity with fixed ideas, whose underlying phenomenology is essentially phobic. The two new terms I would like to put forth, following the nomenclature currently accepted by leading clinicians, are dysmorphophobia and taphephobia.

The first condition consists of the sudden appearance and fixation in the consciousness of the idea of one's own deformity; the individual fears that he has become deformed (dysmorphos) or might become deformed, and experiences at this thought a feeling of an inexpressible disaster… The ideas of being ugly are not, in themselves, morbid; in fact, they occur to many people in perfect mental health, awakening however only the emotions normally felt when this possibility is contemplated.

But, when one of these ideas occupies someone's attention repeatedly on the same day, and aggressively and persistently returns to monopolise his attention, refusing to remit by any conscious effort; and when in particular the emotion accompanying it becomes one of fear, distress, anxiety, and anguish, compelling the individual to modify his behaviour and to act in a pre-determined and fixed way, then the psychological phenomena has gone beyond the bounds of normal, and may validly be considered to have entered the realm of psychopathology.

The dysmorphophobic, indeed, is a veritably unh ~ Enrico Agostino Morselli

I'd love to be on a show like 'ER.' Just watching it is like, 'Phew.' I loved watching 'Veronica Mars.' 'Buffy' was a big ... I loved 'Buffy.' I would go out of my way to watch 'Buffy.' ~ Enrico Colantoni

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Enrico Manuel Alejandro Stephan Montebello, and you are trespassing on my land. ~ Grace Willows

Let us never forget, tyrants have succeeded throughout history because good, naive people just stood by and did nothing. ~ Enrico Lamet

Fernando de Ismelda," Enrico says. "You won the kingdom's archery competition. I gather it was quite a surprise to everyone."
"Not to me," the boy says.
I decide that I like Fernando de Ismelda. ~ Rae Carson

The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day. ~ Enrico Caruso

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over. ~ Freeman Dyson

I really appreciate an actor who has paid their dues and who has learned hard knocks and has been rewarded in the end. I don't understand young actors who get off the turnip truck and land in Hollywood and get a great job. They do not realize how fortunate they are. ~ Enrico Colantoni

If actors could actually make a living doing theater, that would be my first choice. Sitcoms are the closest thing to being onstage in front of an audience. If I had to choose, it would be theater and doing the occasional movie once in a while, and spending time doing nothing. ~ Enrico Colantoni

I had always sung, as far back as I can remember, for the pure love of it. My voice was contralto, and I sang in a church in Naples from fourteen till I was eighteen. ~ Enrico Caruso

To become a singer requires work, work, and again, work! It need not be in any special corner of the earth; there is no one spot that will do more for you than other places. It doesn't matter so much where you are if you have intelligence and a good ear. ~ Enrico Caruso

In really good companies, you have to lead. You have to come up with big ideas and express them forcefully. I have always been encouraged
or sometimes forced
to confront the very natural fear of being wrong. I was constantly pushed to find out what I really thought and then to speak up. Over time, I came to see that waiting to discover which way the wind was blowing is an excellent way to learn how to be a follower. ~ Roger Enrico

Fermi started to calculate on his own, saying nothing, and in a direct, simple way found the essential point. The ability of a centrifuge to separate U-235 from U-238 was proportional to its length and to the fourth power of the peripheral speed of its rotor. Karl ~ Gregory Benford

Leadership is having a point of view. ~ Roger Enrico

It was he who impressed, time and again, the necessity of singing as nature intended, and - I remember - he constantly warned, don't let the public know that you work. So I went slowly. I never forced the voice. ~ Enrico Caruso

In Toronto, I grew up taking a subway, I grew up taking a bus. I spent my formative adult years in New York City, walking the streets, taking the subway. You're connected to the larger whole. L.A. is so spread out, and you're so incubated inside those cars and it's so exhausting to deal with the traffic, without really having the human contact. ~ Enrico Colantoni

I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world. ~ Richard Rhodes

The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggest the existence of what Hanson calls a "Great Filter," an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from nonliving matter to space-colonizing life. If we discover independently evolved primitive life in our Solar System, this would suggest that primitive life is not rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development-perhaps because assumption 1 is false, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they are able to colonize. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for life on Mars and elsewhere find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where primitive life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential. ~ Max Tegmark

correction of the individual is not sufficient to prevent relapse if we do not also, to the best of our ability, reform the social environment. ~ Enrico Ferri

We watch so many TV shows and movies about jaded or corrupt policemen, we forget people join the police force to do good, and they really care about that. ~ Enrico Colantoni

The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. ~ Roger Enrico

Make no mistake," Enrico says finally. "I never would have accepted your application were it not for the King's order. I expect you will be expelled within the month."
His forthrightness makes me bold. "I expect you will be surprised, my lord. ~ Rae Carson

Fermi turned to Bohr with weary eyes and a slanted smile, and shrugged. "So we thought we had discovered new elements. We even named them - hesperium, ausonium. Wrong! Mythical! They were ordinary old barium and iodine. We were careful - too careful. ~ Gregory Benford

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. ~ Iain Sinclair

I suffer so much in this life. That is what they [the audience] are feeling when I sing, that is why they cry. People who felt nothing in this life cannot sing. ~ Enrico Caruso

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life - another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod - there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. ~ Liu Cixin

Everybody remembers 'Just Shoot Me,' and I'm very proud of that. It's still on TV, and people still catch it and laugh about it, and I personally have wonderful, wonderful memories working with those people. ~ Enrico Colantoni

I know that any fan of 'Veronica Mars' is hardcore and loyal, so I give them the time; we spend time talking about it because it warrants that. ~ Enrico Colantoni

During empathy one is simply 'there for' the other individual, when experiencing their own feelings while listening to the other, i.e. during sympathy, the listener pays attention to something about themselves, and is not 'there for' the client. Consider how you would feel if you sensed that the individual listening to you was getting into their own 'stuff' rather than hearing and reflecting exactly what you were feeling in a moment of need? ~ Enrico Caruso

From Italy, I'd get calls from cousins and aunts saying, 'I don't think you should act. It's really tough. What are the chances?' This was around the time 'Flashdance' came out, and I was like, 'What about your dreams? I'm a maniac.' ~ Enrico Colantoni

The very things that I would love about Barack and that you would love about Barack is that he is one of us. He's a normal guy. He's not a political animal. ~ Enrico Letta

I'm a hockey fan; I watch hockey, and I listen to the news. ~ Enrico Colantoni

Watermelon - it's a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face. ~ Enrico Caruso

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium.

The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths.

The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro.

Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. S ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice sounded surprised. ~ Richard Rhodes

When the sommelier Enrico Bernardo moved to Paris from Italy nearly two decades ago, the world of French gastronomy brutally rejected him. No matter that he had won the competition for best sommelier in Italy; when he asked 30 restaurateurs for work in their wine cellars, all turned him down. ~ Elaine Sciolino

I know that I am a singer and an actor, yet in order to give the public the impression that I am neither one nor the other, but the real man conceived by the author, I have to feel and to think as the man the author had in mind. ~ Enrico Caruso

reaches the American consumer, only one American worker has physically touched the final product: the UPS delivery guy. ~ Enrico Moretti

You know what, I'm a big, big fan of 'Heroes,' but the day they told me that the end of the world was coming, and that day didn't come, I stopped watching. ~ Enrico Colantoni

The real leaders of tomorrow are already working on the next big idea, the one that will drive growth into future. They're already far beyond the ideas that created today's results. ~ Roger Enrico

The hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard. ~ Ted Chiang

To see how many Italians are going out of Italy, the sort of exodus, a great generation leaving my country, I think is the worst nightmare for me as prime minister but also for the country, of course. ~ Enrico Letta

During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth's atmosphere. They just didn't know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won't propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

It's like watching a car accident, that reality TV. ~ Enrico Colantoni

The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary - Fermi was only then inventing that specialty - but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city. ~ Richard Rhodes