Alvin M. Weinberg

Alvin Martin Weinberg (April 20, 1915 – October 18, 2006) was a nuclear physicist and administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006.

Alvin M. Weinberg (circa 1960)

Quotes

• The philosophy of science is concerned with how you decide if a scientific finding is correct or true. You have to establish criteria to determine if the finding or theory is valid. Validity is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, but the fundamental problem in the philosophy of scientific administration is the question of value. Two scientific activities are equally valid if they achieve results that are true. Now, how do you decide which activity is more valuable? The question of value is the basic question that the scientific administrator asks so that decisions can be made about funding priorities.
  • Interview by Bill Cabage and Carolyn Krause for the ORNL Review (April 1995).

• As for the Internet, I tend to have profound doubts about the value of this communication advance to science. I wonder if, in an era of the Internet, we can have somebody like Eugene Wigner. Eugene Wigner's genius manifested itself in his ability to concentrate for a long time on a single idea. If you are constantly beset by outside ideas, can you really get to the true heart of the matter? It's a very different way of doing science.
  • Interview by Bill Cabage and Carolyn Krause for the ORNL Review (April 1995).

External links

• PPT file of quotes from The first nuclear era: the life and times of a technological fixer by Alvin Weinberg (1994).
• The Second Nuclear Era by Alvin Weinberg (1983).