American Physicist Quotes

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

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.

Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.

Irving Langmuir

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

Allan McLeod Cormack

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.

On further reflection, I now think that in arguing his case Bell exaggerated, oversimplified the historical development of both classical electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, and as a result arrived at a definition of "understanding" that may be too rigid in that it reflects a presumption - a prejudice, if you will - as to what constitutes physical reality.

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

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".

The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil…. We [will] start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century.

David Goodstein

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'

Charles Hard Townes

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

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.

I am an experimenter, or rather I used to be one. Then I stopped working, and since then people think I am a theoretician.

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

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

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

Frederick Seitz

Nature is as it is because this is the only possible nature consistent with itself.

It's pretty hard for me to lecture in French. I had to go to the Riviera afterwards to recuperate; I don't know what the audience had to do.

John Hasbrouck van Vleck

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.

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.

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

MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO YEARS Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time by Our Planetary Neighbors.

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

Good physics can be done if we have a good shop. … Given a good shop and good measurement equipment a sound physicist can do wonderful work.

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

Arthur Leonard Schawlow