Alice Kimball Smith

Alice Kimball Smith (May 8, 1907 – February 6, 2001) was an American teacher, writer, and historian, known for her writing about her experiences in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Quotes Szilard is one of a brilliant group of Hungarian émigrés, which also included John von Neumann, Michael Polanyi, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller. He believes this remarkable concentration of scientific talent grew out o( a special environment in Budapest at the turn of the century—a society where economic security was taken for granted, a high value was placed on intellectual achievement, and physics was taught so badly that serious students were thrown upon their own resources. July 1960 The elusive Dr. Szilard Harper’s Magazine 77–86 https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb0513487d/_1.pdf (quote from p. 78) ... on many questions involving science and public affairs those who know cannot speak whereas those who are free to speak often do not do so for fear that their information is not adequate. https://books.google.com/books?id=qr3aAAAAMAAJ&q=questions A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945-47 9780226766058 Smith Alice Kimball 1965 (quote from p. 534) In the strenous autumn of 1945, when scientist tried to provide legislators with a new set of facts and a new concept of military destruction, two courses were advocated. Leo Szliard called for intensive pressure on key individuals; the scientists' lobby, which helped to establish civilian control of atomic energy, was a collective exercise in this technique. Rabinowitch, while supporting this crash program, argued that the radical change in patterns of political behavior required by the new weapons would be achieved only by the long, painfully slow process of education. The education must begin with the scientists themselves for, said Rabinowitch, the scientists had a lot to learn about how to handle political and social evidence as scrupulously as they used laboratory data, and how to think politically with the same blend of imagination and rationality that they applied to scientific questions. 10.1126/science.153.3744.1627 Rabinowitch Awarded Kalinga Prize 1966 Science 153 3744 1627 5331117 1966Sci...153.1627K Had the outcome of Los Alamos been anything less than the threat of man's self-destruction, I daresay what would have stuck longest in everyone's mind is the sheer absurdity, the general wackiness, of the whole operation. 10.1080/00963402.1970.11457820 https://books.google.com/books?id=KAcAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA20 Los Alamos: Focus of an Age 1970 Smith Alice Kimball Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 26 6 15–20 1970BuAtS..26f..15S (quote from p. 20) External links Category:1907 births Category:2001 deaths Category:Women academics from the United States Category:Historians from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:People from Illinois Category:Women authors from the United States Category:Women born in the 20th century