American Physicist Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Richard Arnold Epstein

If you really look at it, I was trying to sell a dream … There was very little I could put in concrete to tell these people it was really real.

Playing the game is far more satisfying than reading the rules.

Individual curiosity, often working without practical ends in mind, has always been a driving force for innovation.

Frederick Seitz

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

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.

Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.

At the leading edge of experience in philosophy, science and feeling there is inevitably a groping for language to translate the insecure novelty of noticing and understanding into a precision of meaning and imagery.

Frank Oppenheimer

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.

Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.

I would insist that any proposal for a radically new theory in physics or in any other science, contain a clear explanation of why the precedent science worked. What new domain of experience is being explored by the new science, and how does it meld with the old?

Jeremy Bernstein

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

George Yuri Rainich

As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees's dog.

Steven Weinberg

By the end of this book, you too will know how God weaves the universe out of a web of interlocking fields. I would like to change Dirac's statement "God is a mathematician" to "God is a quantum fiel theorist".

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

In the absence of a firm theoretical basis for the law [conservation of baryon number], we can only conclude that it is known to be true with great accuracy.

Maurice Goldhaber

It is impossible for any sensitive person to look at a star-filled sky without being stirred by thoughts of creation and eternity. The mystery of the origin and destiny of the universe haunts us throughout our lives.

Herbert Friedman

Meaning does not reside in the mathematical symbols. It resides in the cloud of thought enveloping these symbols. It is conveyed in words; these assign meaning to the symbols.

The Earth is warming but physical evidence from around the world tells us that human-emitted carbon dioxide has played only a minor role in it. Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) that goes back at least one million years.

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.