American Physicist Quotes

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.

Field guides are instruments of the pleasure of pure knowledge.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

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.

As soon as you have infinity in mathematics everything breaks down.

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.

The scientific paradox is only an exception to some familiar but too inclusive generalization. It, therefore, has both the appeal of the riddle and the charm of surprise — the surprise, the instant the truth is seen, of a sudden and unexpected discovery....

William Jackson Humphreys

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.

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.

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

Although most physicists today place the probability of the existence of tachyons only slightly higher than the existence of unicorns, research into the properties of these hypothetical FTL [faster than light] particles has not been entirely fruitless.

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

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

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

The most that any scientist can ask is that he help to lay a few stones of a partially-built edifice that we call scientific knowledge. To him this edifice is a beautiful structure, although it will never be finished.

Owen Chamberlain

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

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

The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion.

Harold J. Morowitz

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.