British Physicist Quotes

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

The technique of birth control can be suppressed only if one abolishes also the technique of death control: medicine and hygiene.

Life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

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

Frederick Soddy

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

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 think, without exception, the diamond is the most sensitive substance I have yet met for ready and brilliant phosphorescence.

William Crookes

The existing theories of the interaction of elementary particles and fields are all unsatisfactory in one way or another. The imperfections may well arise from the use of wrong dynamical systems to represent atomic phenomena, i.e., wrong Hamiltonians and wrong interaction energies. It thus becomes a matter of great importance to set up new dynamical systems and see if they will better describe the atomic world.

Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

"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."

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

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.

Science is essentially a public and social activity.

About James Chadwick book:

I have read with pleasure this little book of my friend Dr. J. Chadwick. It is a clear and accurate account of radioactive phenomena written by one who has a first-hand knowledge of the facts.

Of the book 'Radioactivity And Radioactive Substances'

Ernest Rutherford

An optical unit has been devised which will convey optical images along a flexible axis. The unit comprises a bundle of fibres of glass, or other transparent material, and it therefore appears appropriate to introduce the term 'fibrescope' to denote it.

Harold Horace Hopkins

From the point of view of the physicist, a theory of matter is a policy rather than a creed; its object is to connect or co-ordinate apparently diverse phenomena, and above all to suggest, stimulate and direct experiment. It ought to furnish a compass which, if followed, will lead to observer further and further into previously unexplored regions.

The rational transparency and beauty of the universe are surely too remarkable to be treated as just happy accidents.

John Polkinghorne

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.

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.

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

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

My starting point is as an academic who always thought nuclear was the answer, but who then looked at the figures and came to an inescapable conclusion that solar-hydrogen is the long-term future. I did not come at this as a green evangelist. I am a reluctant convert.

In talking of evolution, it is common to have in mind a tree.

Russell Stannard

One day I had the idea of radiation implosion. As in all ideas that have ever popped up in my head, there is no way I can trace the source.

John Clive Ward