20th-century Scientist Quotes

Enrico Fermi

Werner Heisenberg

Richard Dawkins

Richard Feynman

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Linus Pauling

Louis de Broglie

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.

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

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 the absence of a firm theoretical basis for the law [conservation of baryon number], we can only conclude that it is known to be true with great accuracy.

Maurice Goldhaber

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

It is a fantastic letter. Very understated. He calls it an optical maser, it's as if a maser was made to run in the optical. No flamboyant phrase, just straightforward science.

This is the goal: To make available for life every place where life is possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all life purposeful.

One can see clearly some ambivalence in Dirac's attitudes... On the one hand, he has repeated many, many times his conviction that beauty in the fundamental equations of physics has priority... On the other hand... we see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon.

Beta decay was... like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Strangely enough, many of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum mechanics are today being used to entice potential students into physics. As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow's students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago.

It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning.

William Alfred Fowler

The standard model longs for the Higgs particle in order to be a sound theory.

Thus was born the vast modern subject of nuclear physics, which now gives such fertile research problems to so many of the world's physicists and, incidentally, such headaches to so many of the world's statesmen.

Patrick Blackett

Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists.

David Finkelstein

Often we are faced with a very large body of facts, and the problem is to know upon which facts to place a value. But it is not a matter of selecting which facts with regard to the existence of extraterrestrial life — the problem here is that there are virtually no facts. It is largely a speculative matter, and I speculate that there is no life.

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.

In the labs, the young make things move, and the older ones follow like parents evolving with their children.

Catherine Bréchignac

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

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

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

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.

Science is the locomotive that drives our civilization.

Nicholas Metropolis

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

Peter van Nieuwenhuizen