Mark Oliphant Quotes

Going after the unknown is always fascinating, I think. It becomes part of your life, this desire to know.

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.

I lost my hair mixing a substance called white gunpowder on the kitchen table.

It was essential to do this job, hateful though it was, because we knew the Germans were hot on the trail.

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.