20th-century Scientist Quotes

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

Catherine Bréchignac

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

Let there be an SU(5) Yang-Mills theory with all its gauge bosons, let the symmetry be broken down spontaneously, and let all but one of the remaining massless gauge bosons be sold into infrared slavery. That one last gauge boson is my favorite. Let him rush forth to illuminate all of my creations!

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.)

Our planet is not in a special place in the solar system, our Sun is not in a special place in our galaxy and our galaxy is not in a special place in the Universe.

Marcelo Gleiser

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: Atoms cannot be seen. To show that the world was made of particles a million times smaller than objects visible to the naked eye was so difficult that their existence was not established beyond reasonable doubt until the end of the nineteenth century.