20th-century Physicist Quotes

You need only a sheet of paper and so mathematics starts.

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

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

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

Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained.
It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual.

I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions.

Richard A. Muller

Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians. These parallel global warmings — observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth — can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov

Although quantum theory involves the use of nonlocal states, such as wave packets and entangled states, there is nothing in the theory, or in the real world so far as it is accurately described by quantum theory, that corresponds to the sorts of instantaneous nonlocal influences which have often been thought to arise in the situation envisaged in the EPR paradox, or implied by the fact that quantum theory violates Bell inequalities.

Robert Griffiths

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works.

Michael E. Mann

Since the atom, as a whole, is neutral, there must be a positive charge associated with the atom equal in amount to the sum of the negative charges. The electrical forces between the positive and negative charges preserve the equilibrium of the atom.

If one can tell ahead of time what one's research is going to be, the research problem cannot be very deep and may be said to be almost nonexistent.

Coming out of space and incident on the high atmosphere, there is a thin rain of charged particles known as the primary cosmic radiation.

There are many more wrong answers than right ones, and they are easier to find.

Michael W. Friedlander

The increase of scientific knowledge lies not only in the occasional milestones of science, but in the efforts of the very large body of men who with love and devotion observe and study nature.

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

The theory of quanta is similar to other victories in science; for some months you smile at it, and then for years you weep.

It is of course the ambition of every experimenter... to make a discovery, to sail safely between the Scylla of intellectual prejudice which makes us reject evidence not really integrated without preconceived notions, and the Charybdis of irrelevance which has swallowed many working days spent in pursuit of instrumental artifice.

The quarks and the stars were here when you came, and they will be here when you go. They have no sense of humor so, if you want a world where more people smile, you will have to fix things yourselves.

Richard E. Taylor

What counts, I found, is not what you cover, but what you uncover. Covering subjects in a class can be a boring exercise, and students feel it. Uncovering the laws of physics and making them see through the equations, on the other hand, demonstrates the process of discovery, with all its newness and excitement, and students love being part of it.

Physics tend to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the gurus who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow.

The definition of conventional technology is that it worked once.

Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky

The far spaces of the galaxies are teeming with life; but the life-bearing planets are separated by awesome gaps of space and time. We are lost in space — marooned in the small section of the universe assigned to us.

Our beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world around us are the roots of our values, and our values determine not only our immediate actions, but also, over the course of time, the form of our society. Our beliefs are increasingly determined by science. Hence it is at least conceivable that what science has been telling us for three hundred years about man and his place in nature could be playing by now an important role in our lives.

This heat [developed after fission stops in a reactor] is like the still thrashing tail of a dead dragon.

Frank N. von Hippel

No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid.

Ernest Lawrence