Sublime

Fermi and the Manhattan Project embodied an age of discovery that rewarded quality over quantity in expertise. In nuclear physics, the 1930s and 1940s were an age of fundamental breakthroughs, and when it came to making those breakthroughs, one Enrico Fermi was worth thousands of less brilliant physicists. American leadership in this era was built

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Vail persuaded his new board of directors that to solve these problems, the company should create a quarantined group working on “fundamental” research. Like Bush, he understood the need for separating and sheltering radical ideas—the need for a department of loonshots run by loons, free to explore the bizarre. Vail put a physicist from MIT, Frank

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