British Physicist Quotes

Ernest Rutherford

Paul Dirac

J. J. Thomson

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

Rosalind Franklin

Arthur Eddington

Dennis Gabor

Physics tend to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the gurus who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow.

People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

It is more important to know the properties of chlorine than the improprieties of Claudius!

Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell

Thus was born the vast modern subject of nuclear physics, which now gives such fertile research problems to so many of the world's physicists and, incidentally, such headaches to so many of the world's statesmen.

Patrick Blackett

Physical reality is neither some objective truth "out there" nor a purely subjective experience "in here." It is a uniquely human description of the interaction between humanity and Nature, involving elements of both inner and outer realms.

John Ellis (physicist)

Viewing the laws of the electric circuit from the point at which the labours of Ohm has placed us, there is scarcely any branch of experimental science in which so many and such various phenomena are expressed by formulae of such simplicity and generality...

Charles Wheatstone

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

While the biological properties of deoxypentose nucleic acid suggest a molecular structure containing great complexity, X-ray diffraction studies described here...show the basic molecular configuration has great simplicity.

Rosalind Franklin

The way that the background fields generates mass is rather like the way in which when light passes through a transparent medium like glass or water, it gets slowed down. It no longer travels with the fundamental velocity of light c. And that's the way to think of the generation of mass.

Science aims at a vigorous adult, intelligent, serpentlike wisdom, and active interference with the course of nature; religion aims at a meek, receptive, child-hearted attitude of dovelike resignation to the Divine will.

There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.

Anthony James Leggett

The seemingly useless or trivial observation made by one worker leads on to a useful observation by another; and so science advances, "creeping on from point to point."

Silvanus P. Thompson

It may be objected by some that I have concentrated too much on the dry bones [of thermodynamic theory], and too little on the flesh which clothes them, but I would ask such critics to concede at least that the bones have an austere beauty of their own.

Possibly the best way to agitate a group of jaded but philosophically inclined physicists is to buy them a bottle of wine and mention interpretations of quantum mechanics. It is like opening a Pandora's box. I have been amused to discover that the number of viewpoints often exceeds the number of participants.

Science is essentially a public and social activity.

If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.

The Higgs is a very special type of particle - one we've never seen before. It has strange properties that we need to understand. This award was a complete surprise to me. It's really quite humbling and of course I'm delighted to receive it. I'm over the moon to be frank.

Tejinder Virdee

"Big Crunch" is... an ugly term which hardly seems appropriate for so important an event as the end of the universe. But there is no convention as yet for a label of the moment of destruction at the end of time, and I am free to borrow the term "omega point."

Astronomy is probably the oldest of all the sciences. It differs from virtually all other science disciplines in that it is not possible to carry out experimental tests in the laboratory.

Science is a special kind of explanation of the things we see around us. It starts with a problem and curiosity. Something strikes the scientist as odd. It doesn't fit in with the usual explanation. Maybe harder thinking or more careful observation will resolve the problem. If it remains apuzzle, it stimulates the scientist's imagination.

Compare, for instance, the accuracy with which we can describe and foretell the path of a planet with our ignorance of the movements of the atmosphere as dependent on the heat of the sun. The planet keeps to the astronomer's timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

John Henry Poynting

Coming out of space and incident on the high atmosphere, there is a thin rain of charged particles known as the primary cosmic radiation.

A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory.

I am afraid the knockabout comedy of modern atomic physics is not very tender towards our aesthetic ideals. The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades in the films. The music of the spheres has a painful suggestion of — jazz.

Arthur Eddington

Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.

Frederick Soddy