“This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories …. The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per grammer. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth … hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound.”

— A.W. Bickerton

From Basics of space flight, Ludwik Marian Celnikier, 1993, ISBN 2863321323, quoting "Discouraging Words", Spaceflight, 34, 225 (1992).

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A.W. Bickerton 2

British scientist 1842–1929

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“How will you construct the gun that will stand this strain? … you will enter the shell and detonate the explosive and start off at 7 miles a second. That is, you get a blow 50 times as hard as if struck by a Big Bertha shell. Clearly, you are flattened like a pancake. The bump is equal to a fall from a height of many thousands of miles …. This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. all these errors could be easily avoided by correlative meetings of groups of different scientists investigating all kinds of cosmic problems. This is the work the Correlative Science Society, established by the Royal Botanic Society, has been attempting to do with most encouraging results.”

A.W. Bickerton (1842–1929) British scientist

From Scholar-Errant: A biography of Professor A.W. Bickerton, by R.M. Burdon, Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1956, quoting an article by Bickerton in the Daily Mail, who was then apparently commenting on a plan by some Russian scientists to be launched to the moon from a large gun, a la Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon:

“It would be interesting to use high temperatures - in the billions, which develop during atomic bomb explosions, for conducting synthetic reactions (for example, the formation of helium from hydrogen), which are the source of energy of stars and which could raise the energy liberated during the explosion of basic matter (uranium, bismuth, lead) even higher.”

Yakov Frenkel (1894–1952) Russian physicist

Quoted in The world of Andrei Sakharov: a Russian physicist's path to freedom (2005) By Gennadiĭ Efimovich Gorelik, Antonina W. Bouis, p. 134.

“In a sense, all of Earth glows in the dark. The energy release from natural radioactivity, the lingering fluorescence of stellar explosions, keeps Earth dynamic. It melts the core and keeps it flowing, and heats the crust and mantle, with consequences ranging from the generation of earth's magnetic field to earthquakes and the motion of continents. By contrast, Luna and Mars, because they are smaller, derive less energy from radioactive decays. Geologically, they are dead.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.11 Explosions and Fluourescence (or, Entropy's Revenge)

“I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.”

Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Address to the United Nations, New York City (September 18, 1959), as reported by The New York Times (September 19, 1959), p. 8. The physicist quoted was eventually found to be William Davidon, associate physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois.

“When the ratio of nutrients to calories is high, fat melts away, and health is restored. The more nutrient-dense food you consume, the more you'll be satisfied with fewer calories, and the less you'll crave fat and high-calorie foods.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Introduction
The End of Dieting (2014)

“Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Haunted (2005)

“SPACESHIP EARTH: Earth is an automated Spaceship speeding rotatively at 66,000 miles per hour around the sun, which in turn, is on its own course at 6.0 kilometers per second within the Galactic Nebula. The awareness of Earth’s mobile patterning within the cosmos gives the perspective needed to deal with the overall evolutionary event-patterning aboard our spherical space-vehicle Earth, rather than the minute details. The automated events transpiring aboard Earth lend powerful advantages to those who comprehend the automation and attempt to work with it in the most long-term, humanly advantageous ways rather than ignorantly attempting to control or oppose it. Both Earth’s and humanity’s automation are biological.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

Source: 1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969), p. 102

“The problem of thermonuclear reactions is not a usual physics problem. This is a problem that must transform society and the world. Our generation, which gave to mankind atomic energy and thermonuclear energy in the form of explosions, is responsible to humanity for solving the main problem of energy – obtaining energy from water. People are waiting for the solution of this problem. Our duty is to solve it within the lifetime of our generation, and therefore we must set out on this path.”

Gersh Budker (1918–1977) Soviet physicist

as quoted by D. D. Ryutov in [G.I. Budker: reflections & remembrances, by Boris N. Breizman, Springer, 1993, http://books.google.com/books?id=e0bxFrmNtykC&printsec=frontcover#PRA1-PA278,M1, 1-56396-070-2, 278]

“The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Nine, A Death Of Interest, p. 225

“According to the Special Theory of Relativity, the velocity of a moving body is always less than the velocity of light. Since the energy of motion of a body depends on its inertial mass and its velocity, it follows that if the energy of a body is increased indefinitely by the continual application of a force, the inertial mass of the body must be increased too; for, if not, the velocity would ultimately increase indefinitely and exceed the velocity of light. Einstein found that, corresponding to any increase in the energy content of a body, there is an equivalent increase in its inertial mass. Mass and energy thus appeared to be different names for the same thing, the energy associated with a mass M being Mc2, where c is the velocity of light; and the mass M of a body moving with velocity v he found to be given by the following formulaM = \frac {m}{\sqrt{(1 - \frac {v^2}{c^2}}}</center”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

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