If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating. And if the layman runs into serious perplexities, he can be consoled with the thought that the points which baffle him are more than likely the ones for which the professionals have not found satisfactory answers.

In short, the greatest contribution to real security that science can make is through the extension of the scientific method to the social sciences and a solution of the problem of complete avoidance of war.

On May 15, 1957 Linus Pauling made an extraordinary speech to the students of Washington University. ... It was at this time that the idea of the scientists' petition against nuclear weapons tests was born. That evening we discussed it at length after dinner at my house and various ones of those present were scribbling and suggesting paragraphs. But it was Linus Pauling himself who contributed the simple prose of the petition that was much superior to any of the suggestions we were making.

On the Enquirer I specialized in news of organized labor. … The dock and timber workers and the migratory farm laborers…were drawn to communism. The California State Legislature had passed a strong bill defining criminal syndicalism and making it a felony. The politicians were looking for a place to use it. On November 9, 1919, I was the only reporter from a conservative paper to cover the organization meeting of the Communist Labor Party of California, as it was then called. I wrote lurid and sensational stories about this small group of…persons, which resulted in indictments against them, and which required that I had to testify against them, in trial after trial, over the next several years. In this connection I became aware of open boasting by a police detective of his having framed some of the defendants in a matter where I knew the facts to be otherwise. The effect of this involvement on me was to wipe out any desire to be…[a] newspaperman; so I entered the university and went into physical science largely as a means of escape from the corruption of the world, in addition to the fact that I was genuinely interested in physical science.

The whole apparatus of using loyalty-security hearings for working off personal political spite has been firmly established as a part of our “way of life” and I do not see anything happening yet to loosen the hold of this machinery on us.

There has come about a general public awareness that America is not automatically, and effortlessly, and unquestionably the leader of the world in science and technology. This comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched and tried to warn against the steady deterioration in the teaching of science and mathematics in the schools for the past quarter century. It comes as no surprise to those who have known of dozens of cases of scientists who have been hounded out of jobs by silly disloyalty charges, and kept out of all professional employment by widespread blacklisting practices.

What, more petitions! Won't you be, and stay, intimidated? You must really annoy Sen. Dodd. Here it is [my signature], and I hope it does some good.

Son of a railroad engineer in the western United States, sometimes newspaper man in San Francisco, [Edward] Condon’s scientific career combined the abstract with the practical, theory and observation in a unique way.

Of all the American scientists whose concern about the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki led them to devote themselves to the cause of peace, none was more dedicated nor more effective than [Edward] Condon. His efforts as Science Adviser to the Select Committee on Atomic Energy of the United States Senate after the war had much to do with the decision by the Congress to place government responsibility for atomic energy in a civilian rather than a military agency.

The middle third of the twentieth century was the era of hegemony of physics in American science. During that whole period Edward Uhler Condon was a leader in physics, in research of his own, in stimulating research in others, in applying physics, and in calling attention to the effects on all of us of its indiscriminate and irrational application. When he made his first contribution to theoretical physics in 1926, the word physics was not in the vocabularies of most Americans and the revolutionary concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity were just being worked out in Europe; by 1960 the applications of electronics and solid state physics had begun to change our lives irreversibly, and the implications of nuclear physics were manifest to everyone. Ed Condon contributed to each part of this explosive evolution.