American Physicist Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Charles Greeley Abbot

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.

Evelyn Fox Keller

Individually, man is more or less of an enigma; in the mass he is a mathematical problem.

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 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

The concept of entropy no means restricted to mechanical situations. The unfortunate fate of Humpty-Dumpty is an example of a drastic entropy of quite a different system. His demise from a highly organized whole egg to one that was completely scrambled was also highly irreversible.

My friend devotes himself to his life, whenever he can find the spare time. His motto is: 'Don't just sit there: live!' So he's too busy to stand, to walk, to do anything, except to live. He even refused to kiss a girl, when invited, on the grounds that it was time again to be living. Schedules are sacred to him.

Marvin L. Cohen

As we explore physics at higher and higher energy, revealing its structure at shorter and shorter distances, we discover more and more symmetry.

The definition of conventional technology is that it worked once.

Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky

Our beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world around us are the roots of our values, and our values determine not only our immediate actions, but also, over the course of time, the form of our society. Our beliefs are increasingly determined by science. Hence it is at least conceivable that what science has been telling us for three hundred years about man and his place in nature could be playing by now an important role in our lives.

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

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

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

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

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

It has been thought since physics began that matter was made up of particles. We had changed that point of view now. We now think that matter is made up of little strings.

There are many more wrong answers than right ones, and they are easier to find.

Michael W. Friedlander

If one can tell ahead of time what one's research is going to be, the research problem cannot be very deep and may be said to be almost nonexistent.

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

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

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

George Yuri Rainich

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.