20th-century Scientist Quotes

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

The universe is popping all over the place.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Léon Rosenfeld

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

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

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

Great physics does not automatically imply complicated mathematics!

Martinus J. G. Veltman

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

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

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

I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.

Scientific theories are not overthrown; they are expanded, refined, and generalized.

A scientist has the additional responsibility that comes with being a specialist: explaining science to the public, advising of its usefulness and benefits, and warning of its dangers and disadvantages. This is the responsibility of any specialist.

Since we find it difficult to make a suitable model of a certain type, Nature must find it difficult too. This argument neglects the possibility that Nature may be cleverer than we are. It even neglects the possibility that we may be cleverer tomorrow than we are today.

I think there is a need for something completely new. Something that is too different, too unexpected, to be accepted as yet.

Anton Zeilinger

It would be interesting to use high temperatures - in the billions, which develop during atomic bomb explosions, for conducting synthetic reactions (for example, the formation of helium from hydrogen), which are the source of energy of stars and which could raise the energy liberated during the explosion of basic matter (uranium, bismuth, lead) even higher.