Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series)
- Kind
- Book
- Date
- 1989-05
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Retrieved
- Sep 3, 2011
- ISBN
- 0465001165
- EAN
- 9780465001163
4 memes from this reference
How Peer Review Hurts Science
In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me he thought I was making a…
Look for New Problems to Solve
[My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did.
Nuclear Bombs End Large-Scale Warfare
The last few centuries have seen the world freed from several scourges—slavery, for example; death by torture for heretics; and, most recently, smallpox. I am optimistic enough to believe that the next scourge to disappear will be large-scale warfare—killed by the existence and nonuse of nuclear weapons.
The Hierarchical World of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
The world of mathematics and theoretical physics is hierarchical. That was my first exposure to it. There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented…