When the first atom was split in 1932, the newspaper man asked Rutherford why he split atoms and Rutherford said, "Oh, we're like children, we have to take the watch apart to see how it works." And I think that is absolutely right. That's how it all began....It was our nature that we just are tinkerers, and then of course it turned out that when you did that with uranium that it fell apart in an even more spectacular way, which we call fission. And as soon as you discovered that, then you knew how to make bombs.
--Freeman Dyson (1923-) in "Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic," a television show that premieres on PBS in December 2008. Cited in Science News, 20 December 2008
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