American Physicist Quotes

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Richard Feynman

Albert A. Michelson

Robert Andrews Millikan

Arthur Compton

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.

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.

In a randomly infinite Universe, any event occurring here and now with finite probability must be occurring simultaneously at an infinite number of other sites in the Universe. It is hard to evaluate this idea any further, but one thing is certain: if it is true then it is certainly not original!

Frank J. Tipler

To say that science is logical is like saying that a painting is paint....

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.

Another way in which science and religion are frequently contrasted is in terms of the personal and impersonal. This contrast is based on the belief that science is a dispassionate, completely detached activity in which the process of knowing is independent of the involvement or participation of the knower. In contrast to this, religious knowledge is deeply personal since it comes only through the passionate involvement and commitment of the believer in that which he knows.

William G. Pollard

Once we begin to flee the things that threaten and burden us, there is no end to fleeing. God's solution is surprising. He offers rest. But it's a unique form of rest. It's to rest in him in the midst of our threats and our burdens. It's discovering, as David did in seasons of distress, that God is our rock and refuge right in the thick of our situation.

I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness. We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.

Science is the locomotive that drives our civilization.

Nicholas Metropolis

So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character. Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously: attentive to cleanliness, who was a consummate villain.

Benjamin Thompson

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

Allan McLeod Cormack

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

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

A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

Leonard Susskind

The really fundamental things have a way of appearing to be simple once they have been stated by a genius...

George Yuri Rainich

For the realm of the stars was slow to change. The sun evolves in billions of years, double stars rotate round each other in many decades, and even famous comets return only after many years. Astronomy deals still in the eternities, but nowadays it cannot neglect the split-second...

Philip Morrison

The theory of everything may come in its time, but not until we are certain that Nature has exhausted her bag of performable tricks.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

The rotating armatures of every generator and motor in this age of electricity are steadily proclaiming the truth of the relativity theory to all who have ears to hear.

Consciousness is the creative element in the universe. Without it, nothing would appear.

Astronomers are very brave and bold, and make vast assumptions based on very little data. Very clever, though. In Dennis Brian

Arthur Leonard Schawlow

All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

Barbara Brennan

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.

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

These days, to be "patriotic" means to wave the flag and shout slogans whenever the mass media deem it appropriate. It means to cheer the government whenever the government decides to use its cruise missiles or its smart bombs to kill a bunch of people in some other country, regardless of the reason. Instead of blood-based patriotism, today we have government-based patriotism. If you wave the flag and support the government, you're a patriot. If you don't like what the government is doing and you say so, then all of the flag-waving, slogan-shouting yahoos look at you as if you were the enemy.

William Luther Pierce

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