Mark Oliphant quotes

Going after the unknown is always fascinating, I think. It becomes part of your life, this desire to know. (Mark Oliphant)
It was essential to do this job, hateful though it was, because we knew the Germans were hot on the trail. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I lost my hair mixing a substance called white gunpowder on the kitchen table. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I, who had been in favour of nuclear energy for generating electricity ... I suddenly realised that anybody who has a nuclear reactor can extract the plutonium from the reactor and make nuclear weapons, so that a country which has a nuclear reactor can, at any moment that it wants to, become a nuclear weapons power. And I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I worked with him for ten years until he died and it was the most wonderful time of my life. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use. View quote
Mark Oliphant
We were able to discover two new kinds of atomic species, one was hydrogen of mass 3, unknown until that time, and the other helium of mass 3, also unknown. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I was a member of a group that was led by Niels Bohr, after the test in Alamogordo, that was very much opposed to the use of this new weapon on civilian cities. ... But by and large we were in a minority, but a rather distinguished minority. View quote
Mark Oliphant
Of course, we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental. View quote
Mark Oliphant
I've lost any belief I ever had in scientific policy. I don't think you can have scientific policy. I think science is something like weeds, it just grows of its own accord. (Mark Oliphant)