American Physicist Quotes

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Richard Feynman

Albert A. Michelson

Robert Andrews Millikan

Arthur Compton

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

John Bardeen

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.
Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

For those who know science, its inhumanness is a fiction. It serves to satisfy the human hunger for a better understanding of man's place in his world.

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

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

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

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

Science is intelligence in action with no holds barred.

Percy Williams Bridgman

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

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

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.

Ever since quantum phenomena became definitely recognized many attempts were made to picture their mechanism.

Every star around us is a favorable target for human migration. You don't have to wait for just those stars that happen to have earthlink planets; they may be very few and far between.

Gerard K. O'Neill

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

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself — nature does it for you.

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

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

It is dangerous to believe hastily that anything is either possible or impossible, for there are few scientific assertions which have been proved to universal satisfaction. Our firmest scientific beliefs of today may be shattered tomorrow.

Robert H. Goddard

An exploration of the challenges Korea faces in transforming its economy from a government-directed, low-cost producer to an innovative world economic power based on its own scientific and technological development.

Lewis M. Branscomb

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

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

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

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

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