American Physicist Quotes

Richard Feynman

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Albert A. Michelson

Arthur Compton

Robert Andrews Millikan

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

John Bardeen

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.

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.

It has been said that all expository books are simply forms of selected plagiarism.

The satellite is a natural extension of rockets, which are natural extensions of planes and balloons, which are natural extensions of man's climbing trees and mountains in order to get up higher and thus have a better view.

James Van Allen

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.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

Philip Warren Anderson

Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important.

John N. Bahcall

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Gregory Benford

Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light.

An exploration of the challenges Korea faces in transforming its economy from a government-directed, low-cost producer to an innovative world economic power based on its own scientific and technological development.

Lewis M. Branscomb

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks.

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

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.

Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know.

For those who know science, its inhumanness is a fiction. It serves to satisfy the human hunger for a better understanding of man's place in his world.

"All is fair in love and war" and, I might add, in theoretical physics.

There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.

Allan McLeod Cormack

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

Clinton Davisson

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.

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias.

Richard Arnold Epstein

The physical "reality" is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself.

The limited imagination of physicists: When we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have... It's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.

Richard Feynman

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