Australian Scientist Quotes

William Lawrence Bragg

Mark Oliphant

John Cornforth

Tim Flannery

Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

Bill Mollison

Gustav Nossal

One of the minor regrets, not really a big regret, is that I've never published a paper with Mac Burnet. I've published 500 papers, not a single one has Burnet as a co-author. He did not believe in putting his name on a paper if he hadn't done at least one third of the work himself. A sort of an honest unselfish approach, when it comes time to reap the glory you do it without having someone grabbing it instead of you.

The details of a research career are dictated partly by accident, but largely by inclinations and temperament.

Arthur Birch (organic chemist)

In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, corrupt and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden light that shows new order and beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark.

It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others.

William Lawrence Bragg

I've lost any belief I ever had in scientific policy. I don't think you can have scientific policy. I think science is something like weeds, it just grows of its own accord … and if you've got the right atmosphere, the right situation within universities or within places like CSIRO, then it grows and develops of its own accord. And I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them.

The existence of exotic dark matter particles outside the standard model of particle physics constitutes a central hypothesis of the current standard model of cosmology (SMoC). Using a wide range of observational data I outline why this hypothesis cannot be correct for the real Universe.

No paper is more seminal for the fields of quantum foundations and quantum information than the 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) paper.

Howard M. Wiseman

One can see clearly some ambivalence in Dirac's attitudes... On the one hand, he has repeated many, many times his conviction that beauty in the fundamental equations of physics has priority... On the other hand... we see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon.

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

It is imperative to get the smelters to pay a fair price for their power; otherwise, market forces can never induce them to limit their emissions.

To a rough approximation, and setting aside vertebrate chauvinism, it can be said that essentially all organisms are insects.

Robert May, Baron May of Oxford