20th-century Physicist Quotes

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

We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.

Alexander Markovich Polyakov

It takes very little imagination to believe naively that anything is possible. Any ten-year-old child can believe this. It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what things are possible and what things are impossible.

Milton A. Rothman

While it is true that theory often sets difficult, if not impossible tasks for the experiment, it does, on the other hand, often lighten the work of the experimenter by disclosing cogent relationships which make possible the indirect determination of inaccessible quantities and thus render difficult measurements unnecessary.

When scientists begin to wonder... how science is possible at all, which is ultimately what their questioning of the mathematical basis of science is about, they are searching for reassurance, for some proof that there really is a fundamental theory out there in the dark waiting to be hunted down.

David Lindley (physicist)

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.

Rabindra Mohapatra

The combination of growing specialization and the peer-review system have fractured science into isolated domains, each with a built-in tendency toward theoretical orthodoxy and a hostility to other disciplines.

A meaningful physical discussion always requires an operational background. Either this is provided by an existing theory, or you have to give it yourself by the sufficiently explicit description of an experiment that can, at least in principle, be performed.

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

It is impossible for any sensitive person to look at a star-filled sky without being stirred by thoughts of creation and eternity. The mystery of the origin and destiny of the universe haunts us throughout our lives.

Herbert Friedman

It may be objected by some that I have concentrated too much on the dry bones [of thermodynamic theory], and too little on the flesh which clothes them, but I would ask such critics to concede at least that the bones have an austere beauty of their own.

To say that science is logical is like saying that a painting is paint....

Modern scientific man has largely lost his sense of awe in the Universe. He is confident that given sufficient intelligence, perseverance, time, and money, he can understand all there is beyond the stars.

Wolfgang Rindler

Indicative of the depth of mathematics lurking behind physicists' conjectures is that fact that the properties that one would like to establish about the renormalization theory of critical circle maps might turn out to be related to number-theoretic abysses such as the Riemann conjecture....

Predrag Cvitanović

Science has no boundaries; it has an horizon which widens as science advances, placing in view more and more unknown terrain but never heaven.

One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen.

Kenneth W. Ford

Possibly the best way to agitate a group of jaded but philosophically inclined physicists is to buy them a bottle of wine and mention interpretations of quantum mechanics. It is like opening a Pandora's box. I have been amused to discover that the number of viewpoints often exceeds the number of participants.

By the end of this book, you too will know how God weaves the universe out of a web of interlocking fields. I would like to change Dirac's statement "God is a mathematician" to "God is a quantum fiel theorist".

When we discover New Earth - a planet we could call home - the question of the plurality of worlds will come front and center, reminding us yet again that we are not the center of the universe.

Dimitar Sasselov

To answer a physical question, one first translates that question into various objects... in the mathematics, with various properties describing the physical setup. Then one manipulates these objects within the mathematics and translates results back into the physical terms. (These "translations" ultimately become automatic.)

In photosynthesis we are like travelers in an unknown country around whom the early morning fog slowly begins to rise, vaguely revealing the outlines of the landscape. It will be thrilling to see it in bright daylight!

Eugene Rabinowitch

It is one of the little ironies of our times that while the layman was being indoctrinated with the stereotype of black holes as the ultimate cookie monsters, the professionals have been swinging round to the almost directly opposing view that black holes, like growing old, are really not so bad when you consider the alternative.

Continued fractions are part of the "lost mathematics," the mathematics now considered too advanced for high school and too elementary for college.

At the leading edge of experience in philosophy, science and feeling there is inevitably a groping for language to translate the insecure novelty of noticing and understanding into a precision of meaning and imagery.

Frank Oppenheimer