20th-century Physicist Quotes

I am an experimenter, or rather I used to be one. Then I stopped working, and since then people think I am a theoretician.

Getting up any cliff is like a physics problem — you just got to hold on, try everything, and stick with it.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions.

Scientific revolutions are not made by scientists. They are declared post factum, often by philosophers and historians of science rather than by the scientists themselves.

Hendrik Casimir

I would like to emphasize strongly my belief that the era of computing chemists, when hundreds if not thousands of chemists will go to the computing machine instead of the laboratory for increasingly many facets of chemical information, is already at hand. There is only one obstacle, namely that someone must pay for the computing time.

Robert S. Mulliken

Great physics does not automatically imply complicated mathematics!

Martinus J. G. Veltman

All our suffering comes from a deficiency to stand up for our beliefs.

It's pretty hard for me to lecture in French. I had to go to the Riviera afterwards to recuperate; I don't know what the audience had to do.

John Hasbrouck van Vleck

A dense film of a conventional surfactant is quite impermeable. On the other hand, a dense film of Janus grains always has some interstices between the grains, and allows for chemical exchange between the two sides; "the skin can breathe". This may possibly be of some practical interest.

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

Each word is a singularity, or is connected with a singularity, in our way of understanding existence.

Léon Rosenfeld

The first characteristic of interest is the fraction of the computational load which is associated with data management housekeeping. This fraction has been very nearly constant for about ten years, and accounts for 40% of the executed instructions in production runs.

No paper is more seminal for the fields of quantum foundations and quantum information than the 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) paper.

Howard M. Wiseman

From its earliest days, science has been embedded in society, there has been a continuous learning process in society as a whole, based on day to day experiences and this can become the body of the knowledge from which applications and understanding have grown. … Everything on earth has to function in harmony as a system, and it is only in such a system that humanity can flourish.

Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon

In our time of ever-increasing specialization, there is a tendency to concern ourselves with relatively narrow scientific problems. The broad foundations of our present-day scientific knowledge and its historical development tend to be forgotten too often. This is an unfortunate trend, not only because our horizon becomes rather limited and our perspective somewhat distorted, but also because there are many valuable lessons to be learned in looking back over the years during which the basic concepts and the fundamental laws of a particular scientific discipline were first formulated.

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

Doing physics is much more enjoyable than just learning it. Maybe 'doing it' is the right way of learning, at least as far as I am concerned.

My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment.

William Shockley

The new kind of politicians lie all the time. But my father was one of the old kind, more of a fanatic. He was driven by some kind of fanaticism. This belief that you can do good. It's a sort of madness.

Valentin Ceaușescu

Being built on concepts, hypotheses, and experiments, laws are no more accurate or trustworthy than the wording of the definitions and the accuracy and extent of the supporting experiments.

The universe is popping all over the place.

Research can be undertaken in any kind of environment, as long as you have the interest. I believe that true education means fostering the ability to be interested in something.

We live of novelty in science. So when you do something new, you have to overcome certain beliefs that it cannot be done, that it's not interesting and so on.

Heinrich Rohrer

Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe.

Richard H. Price

Mathematics is the natural language of theoretical physics. It is the irreplaceable instrument for the penetration of realms of physical phenomena far beyond the ordinary experience upon which conventional language is based.

Julian Schwinger

Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.