20th-century Scientist Quotes

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.

All the richness of structure observed in the natural world is not a consequence of the complexity of physical law, but instead arises from the many-times repeated application of quite simple laws.

Either we've seen the birth of the universe, or we've seen a pile of pigeon shit.

Arno Allan Penzias

The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

You can forget facts but you cannot forget understanding.

Every star around us is a favorable target for human migration. You don't have to wait for just those stars that happen to have earthlink planets; they may be very few and far between.

Gerard K. O'Neill

I do not aspire to a historian's standards of completeness, accuracy, or impartiality.

The modern history of instruments and the patterns of their use may lack the glamour of the history of our over arching theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, these bubbling, sparking, clanking devices remain the weft and the warp of physics.

To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.

Astronomy is probably the oldest of all the sciences. It differs from virtually all other science disciplines in that it is not possible to carry out experimental tests in the laboratory.

There is no concept in the whole field of physics which is more difficult to understand than is the concept of entropy, nor is there one which is more fundamental.

Erwin with his psi can do Calculations quite a few. But one thing has not been seen Just what psi really mean.

Knowledge is alive. It creeps, it grows, it crawls, it jumps. It never stays quite still. We add to it. We tear it in pieces. We put it together again, and then it is a different knowledge.

John Lighton Synge

It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.

Edwin Thompson Jaynes