American Scientist Quotes

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

Robert J. Havighurst

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

Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science.

Stuart Kauffman

Having presented all the relevant nanoscale mechanisms, thus laying down a firm background for the readers' understanding, the author moves to the topic of architectural challenges in Chapter 7. This field is claimed still to be an unsolved problem so the author gives examples of currently used technologies and points out potential architectural solutions such as self-assembly, carbon nanotubes, or quantum systems. That is why it makes the book even more valuable for those who intend to involve nanonetworks in their research.

It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning.

William Alfred Fowler

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

We are going to become Gods, period. If you don't like it, get off. You don't have to contribute, you don't have to participate but if you are going to interfere with me becoming a God, you're going to have trouble. There'll be warfare.

Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.

I have just joined the Board of the Population Institute because I am convinced that early stabilization of the world's population is important for the attainment of this objective.

Science is curiosity, discovering things and asking why.

Victor Weisskopf

Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.

Heinz von Foerster

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.

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony.

Education of both men and women is a wonderful contraceptive.

Henry Way Kendall

... we see a number of sophisticated, yet uneducated, theoreticians who are conversant in the LSZ formalism of the Heisenberg field operators, but do not know why an excited atom radiates, or are ignorant of the quantum theoretic deerivation of Rayleigh's law that accounts for the blueness of the sky.

It was a wonderful mess at that time. Wonderful! Just great! It was so confusing — physics at its best, when everything is confused and you know something important lies just around the corner.

Understanding natural science has been, historically, an important source of mathematical inspiration. So it is frustrating that, at the outset of the new century, the main framework used by physicists for describing the laws of nature is not accessible mathematically.

Magic is essentially metaphorical. So are dreams. So is most artistic activity, Finally, theoretical science is essentially disciplined exploitation of metaphor.

Anatol Rapoport

Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress.

An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.

The only touchstone for empirical truth is experiment and observation.

Ex libro lapidum historia mundi — from the book of rocks comes the history of the Earth.

Luis Walter Alvarez

Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.