American Scientist Quotes

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

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Gregory Benford

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 awkward richness of possibilities seems to shatter any possible coherent theory of simplicity...

Lawrence B. Slobodkin

In photosynthesis we are like travelers in an unknown country around whom the early morning fog slowly begins to rise, vaguely revealing the outlines of the landscape. It will be thrilling to see it in bright daylight!

Eugene Rabinowitch

The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.

Donella Meadows

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

Getting up any cliff is like a physics problem — you just got to hold on, try everything, and stick with it.

There is plenty of wonder left in the universe even after we have examined all the clues nature has thrown our way. I really believe that our imaginations have not even begun to exhaust the possibilities of existence. To proclaim the slogan "The Truth IS Out There" is perhaps too trite. I prefer "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Lawrence M. Krauss

Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense.

If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication.

Julius Sumner Miller

Slowly the molecules enmeshed in ordered asymmetry. A billion years passed, aeons of trial and error. The life message took form, a spiral, a helix, repeating itself endlessly, Swathed in protein, nurtured by enzymes, sheltered in membranes, laved by salt water, armored with lime.

Thomas H. Jukes

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.)

Humility is indeed a distinctive quality of every scientific mind; not humility before man and man-made images, but before the marvellous universe in which the Earth is only a particle.

Henry Augustus Rowland

The collected literature of mathematics is treated as a sacred text to be guarded against corruption and dilution.

It seemed that fundamental physics was stuck. The particle physicists were smashing particles into each other with ever increasing force, trying to figure out how many quarks could dance on the head of a pin. The cosmologists were working with very few facts... on what seemed to me to be mainly religious grounds. And most of physics was still focused on pushing and pulling, on the material properties... rather than on its informational properties.... those that relate to order and disorder.

J. Doyne Farmer

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Mathematics is not a complete and perfected body of doctrine which one goes to seek in the scriptures whenever one has need of it.

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.

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

Karl Taylor Compton

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions.

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

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

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

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

Robert J. Havighurst