American Scientist Quotes

Many thanks for the sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk...Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him.

There is not a "pure" science. By this I mean that physics impinges on astronomy, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology on the other. And not only does each support neighbors, but derives sustenance from them. The same can be said of chemistry. Biology is, perhaps, the example par excellence today of an "impure" Science.

Among nonclassical ions the ratio of conceptual difficulty to molecular weight reaches a maximum with the cyclopropylcarbinyl-cyclobutyl system.

Paul Doughty Bartlett

It is the gifted, unorthodox individual, in the laboratory, or the study, or the walk by the river at twilight, who has always brought to us, and must continue to bring to us, all the basic resources by which we live.

Caryl Parker Haskins

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

Philip Warren Anderson

Most scientists have little enthusiasm for history. The job of the scientist is to make discoveries and develop new ideas. When new ideas prove effective they tend to make old ones obsolete: thus it is not altogether unfair to say that the typical scientist is in the business of creating the future and destroying the past.

Edwin C. Kemble

I see a tremendous amount of intricacy in the world and we have probably only begun to scratch at the surface of its intricacy.

Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe.

Richard H. Price

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.

Albert C. Barnes

We know light best in its diluted form: a gentle rain of photons falling from the sun that illuminates and warms. More concentrated, light is a furnace and a terror.

George M. Whitesides

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

If our world is not "the best of all possible worlds" it certainly is the only one in which it is possible to avoid the dilemma of discontinuity.

The satellite is a natural extension of rockets, which are natural extensions of planes and balloons, which are natural extensions of man's climbing trees and mountains in order to get up higher and thus have a better view.

James Van Allen

The art of friendship has been little cultivated in our society.

Robert J. Havighurst

Here, then, we have the oldest known rocks. Are they, then, absolutely the oldest — the primitive rocks, as some imagine? By no means. They are stratified rocks, and therefore consolidated sediments, and therefore, also, the debris of still older rocks, of which we know nothing. Thus, we seek in vain for the absolutely oldest, the primitive crust.

The concept of "free radicals" was not known in 1920 — well perhaps in politics, but not in chemistry.

Herman Francis Mark

Practically everything your eat, taste, wear, smell and see has resulted in some way from the ingenuity of chemists.

Marston T. Bogert

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

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

Mathematics is the natural language of theoretical physics. It is the irreplaceable instrument for the penetration of realms of physical phenomena far beyond the ordinary experience upon which conventional language is based.

Julian Schwinger

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.)

"All is fair in love and war" and, I might add, in theoretical physics.

There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass.... Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months.

The limited imagination of physicists: When we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have... It's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.

Richard Feynman