American Physicist Quotes

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

The advance from drawing to painting should be gradual, and no serious attempts in colour should be made until the student has obtained proficiency in outline and in light and shade. If the artist cannot draws objects in a rather masterly way there is no point in his attempting colour.

If a poet could at the same time be a physicist, he might convey to others the pleasure, the satisfaction, almost the reverence, which the subject inspires. The aesthetic side of the subject is, I confess, by no means the least attractive to me. Especially is its fascination felt in the branch which deals with light.

Albert A. Michelson

It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning.

William Alfred Fowler

Strangely enough, many of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum mechanics are today being used to entice potential students into physics. As quantum computing and quantum communication become a commercial reality, tomorrow's students may find themselves routinely grappling with the same philosophical questions that challenged their forebears almost a century ago.

Beta decay was... like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Astronomy is the distinguished child of the gypsy-like mother, astrology.

Charles Greeley Abbot

When the teacher has once obtained the mastery over the experiments he will never after be willing to teach without them; for, as an honest teacher, he will know that he cannot teach without them.

Alfred M. Mayer

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

Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained.
It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual.

I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions.

Richard A. Muller

Although quantum theory involves the use of nonlocal states, such as wave packets and entangled states, there is nothing in the theory, or in the real world so far as it is accurately described by quantum theory, that corresponds to the sorts of instantaneous nonlocal influences which have often been thought to arise in the situation envisaged in the EPR paradox, or implied by the fact that quantum theory violates Bell inequalities.

Robert Griffiths

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works.

Michael E. Mann

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

Thus, since it is this power in the atmosphere of storing the heat which makes us live, no less than the sun's rays themselves, we see how the temperature of a planet may depend on considerations quite beside its distance from the sun; and when we discuss the possibility of life in other worlds, we shall do well to remember that Saturn may be possibly a warm world, and Mercury conceivably a cold one.

Samuel Pierpont Langley

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

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

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

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".

I believe that the advent of modern science is the most important social event in all history.

Karl Taylor Compton

To answer a physical question, one first translates that question into various objects... in the mathematics, with various properties describing the physical setup. Then one manipulates these objects within the mathematics and translates results back into the physical terms. (These "translations" ultimately become automatic.)

What will prove altogether remarkable is that some very simple schemes to produce erratic numbers behave identically to some of the erratic aspects of natural phenomena.

Mitchell Feigenbaum

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: Atoms cannot be seen. To show that the world was made of particles a million times smaller than objects visible to the naked eye was so difficult that their existence was not established beyond reasonable doubt until the end of the nineteenth century.

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 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.