20th-century Physicist Quotes

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 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.

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

Michael W. Friedlander

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

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.

Physical reality is neither some objective truth "out there" nor a purely subjective experience "in here." It is a uniquely human description of the interaction between humanity and Nature, involving elements of both inner and outer realms.

John Ellis (physicist)

Another way in which science and religion are frequently contrasted is in terms of the personal and impersonal. This contrast is based on the belief that science is a dispassionate, completely detached activity in which the process of knowing is independent of the involvement or participation of the knower. In contrast to this, religious knowledge is deeply personal since it comes only through the passionate involvement and commitment of the believer in that which he knows.

William G. Pollard

What will prove altogether remarkable is that some very simple schemes to produce erratic numbers behave identically to some of the erratic aspects of natural phenomena.

Mitchell Feigenbaum

MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO YEARS Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time by Our Planetary Neighbors.

It is difficult to find a case where the word "intuition" characterises a human achievement better than in the case of the neutrino invention by Pauli.

Bruno Pontecorvo

The exploration of the cosmos — the moon and the planets — is a noble aim. Our generation has the right to be proud of the fact that it has opened the space era of mankind.

Anatoli Blagonravov

Though we may weigh it as we will, Exhausted and delirious, One-hundred-thirty-seven still Remains for us mysterious. But Eddington, he, sees it clear, Denouncing those who tend to jeer; It is the number of (says he) The world's dimensions. Can it?! be?! —

Meaning does not reside in the mathematical symbols. It resides in the cloud of thought enveloping these symbols. It is conveyed in words; these assign meaning to the symbols.

We are now moving beyond those concepts and the knowledge familiar to us in the first half of this century, and we are entering a world in which science and fantasy intertwine...

Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.

Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich

Only after the atom has lost the last sensible quality does its true meaning for the physical world view become clear; the unity — real, though remote from our immediate perception — of all that our perception knows only as a multitude of appearances is systematically held together and symbolically represented in it, but not mechanically explained.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

The phenomenon of chaos could have been discovered long, long ago. It wasn't, in part because this huge body of work on the dynamics of regular motion didn't lead in that direction. But if you just look, there it is.

Stars are not shy. They make their presence known for trillions of miles around them by the generous stream of radiation that they cast off each second into space.

It is usually the fate of good physical theory that after its initial success, difficulties or limitations of its applicability become apparent. Eventually it is superseded by a better theory in which some of the difficulties are removed or which has a wider field of application, as the case may be.

The universe is more than merely an accretion of electrons, quarks, and galaxies, more than space and time. The complex, interrelated world of the earth which created us is part of it. It is our duty not only to ourselves to preserve this world. The universe itself imposes this task on us.

Harald Fritzsch

What good does all scientific progress do if it cannot be communicated? Do we really understand the world if we cannot explain it without the requirement of long, demanding studies?

Martin Bojowald

The most that any scientist can ask is that he help to lay a few stones of a partially-built edifice that we call scientific knowledge. To him this edifice is a beautiful structure, although it will never be finished.

Owen Chamberlain

The plan of salvation as stated in the Bible can be seen through observation of the universe around us.

Hugh Ross (astrophysicist)

Neutrino physics is largely an art of learning a great deal by observing nothing.

As we explore physics at higher and higher energy, revealing its structure at shorter and shorter distances, we discover more and more symmetry.