20th-century Physicist Quotes

Enrico Fermi

Werner Heisenberg

Richard Feynman

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Louis de Broglie

Paul Dirac

Edward Teller

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.
Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.

Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress.

If the Easter pilgrims in Piazza San Pietro were to represent the carriers in a metal, then an insulator would resemble the Antarctic with one solitary traveler. In the abundance of carriers there is an enormous gap between conductors and insulators.

According to my attempts to understand them, reality is systematically denied in the Copenhagen interpretation in order to circumvent consistency problems (such as Is the electron really a wave or a particle?). If there is no reality, one does not need a consistent description!

Science is the locomotive that drives our civilization.

Nicholas Metropolis

Concepts like these can seem remote, until you explain with analogies taken from everyday life. But unfortunately some ideas do not lend themselves to familiar analogies.

Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

The gravitational force is the oldest force known to man and the least understood.

Peter van Nieuwenhuizen

Good physics can be done if we have a good shop. … Given a good shop and good measurement equipment a sound physicist can do wonderful work.

I know quite clearly what I want out of my life. Life and my emotions are the only things I am conscious of. I love the consciousness of life and I want as much of it as I can get. But the span of one's life is limited. What comes after death no one knows. Nor do I care. Since, therefore, I cannot increase the content of life by increasing its duration, I will increase it by increasing its intensity. Art, music, poetry and everything else … I do have this one purpose — increasing the intensity of my consciousness of life.

History, including that of evolution, is just "one damned thing after another." We can explain in hindsight what has happened, but we cannot predict what will happen in the future. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard expressed the same view in his famous phrase "Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.

Individual curiosity, often working without practical ends in mind, has always been a driving force for innovation.

Frederick Seitz

Neither physical science nor psychology can ever 'explain' human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.

Nevill Francis Mott

A certain ounce of arrogance is not essential in carrying forward an idea. In talking about the device with others, surprising now number of people who either were quite negative and had reasons to suggest it would not function as described or claimed that it would be of little interest and no better than some already existing device.

Science is a special kind of explanation of the things we see around us. It starts with a problem and curiosity. Something strikes the scientist as odd. It doesn't fit in with the usual explanation. Maybe harder thinking or more careful observation will resolve the problem. If it remains apuzzle, it stimulates the scientist's imagination.

Ideas, like large rivers, never have just one source. Just as the waters of a river near its mouth is composed largely of the waters of many tributaries, so an idea, in its final form, is composed largely of later additions.

The influence of science on men's lives comes in two rather different ways — one through the ideas themselves, and the other through their material consequences.

George Paget Thomson

The scientist or engineer—like every other human being—bears also the responsibility of being a useful member of his community...and should speak on issues which can be addressed with competence—including joining hands with other citizens when called to tasks of peace.

Lee Alvin DuBridge

Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony.

For the second law [of thermodynamics], I will burn at the stake.

Research is a matter of overcoming obstacles. That's what research is about. There are problems. There are difficulties. It's hard to make sense of a collection of information or whatever. Obstacles are the nature of research. Maybe that's why some people give up. There's always an obstacle. You overcome one to find there's another one.

Alexander Dalgarno

A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

Leonard Susskind

In closing, I should like to cite a line from William Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand - - - and allude to a possible parallel to see worlds in an electron.

Hans Georg Dehmelt