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

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.

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 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

For me, the creative process, first of all, requires a good nine hours of sleep a night. Second, it must not be pushed by the need to produce practical applications.

William Lipscomb

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

Michael W. Friedlander

We know less about the ocean's bottom than about the moon's back side.

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

There are many reasons, some of them so deep-seated emotionally as to be very difficult of expression. Possibly the simplest explanation is that we started along this road … and I cannot stop until I have won.

Jeannette Piccard

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.

In attempting to discover traces of a science in earliest historic times, one must first disabuse his mind of the idea that he will find it in anything like the elaborated modern form in which he knows it. These natural sciences are the result of a long process of evolution, and the primal form will probably prove a very much disguised one.

Francis Preston Venable

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.

What would have happened if Darwin and Einstein as young men had needed to apply for government support? Their probability of getting past the grant reviewers would be similar to a snowball surviving in Hell.

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