Glenn Seaborg Quotes

All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician

Bertrand Goldschmidt, the French chemist who worked with Glenn Seaborg, puts the Manhattan Engineer District at the height of its wartime development in perspective with a startling comparison. It was, he writes in a memoir, “the astonishing American creation in three years, at a cost of two billion dollars, of a formidable array of factories and laboratories—as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at that date.

Plutonium production at Hanford depended as much on chemical separation as it did on chain-reacting piles. The chemistry was Glenn Seaborg’s, spectacularly scaled up a billionfold directly from his team’s earlier ultramicrochemical work.