British Scientist Quotes

Alexander Graham Bell

Ernest Rutherford

Paul Dirac

J. J. Thomson

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

William Henry Bragg

Dorothy Hodgkin

Find out what an odor is - whether it is an emanation and therefore subject to being weighed, or a vibration and therefore capable of being reflected. Odors are becoming more and more important in the worlds of scientific experiments and in medicine - and the need of more knowledge will bring forth more knowledge, as sure as the sun shines.

Alexander Graham Bell

The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

The nerves have been hitherto considered as chords that have no powers of contraction within themselves, but only serving as a medium, by means of which the influence of the brain may be communicated to the muscles, and the impressions made upon the different parts of the body conveyed to the brain.

Wait, then, my soul! submissive wait,
Prostrate before His awful seat;
And mid the terrors of His rod,
Trust in a wise and gracious God!

Richard Henry Beddome

And so, after many years, victory has come, and the romance of exploration, of high hopes and bitter disappointment, will in a few years simply be recorded in the text-books of organic chemistry in a few terse sentences.

Cursory inspection of the world suggests it is a giant complex with dense connections between its parts. We cannot cope with it in that form and are forced to reduce it to some separate areas which we can examine separately'...

Peter Checkland

A good theory is one which almost always leads to further discovery, but no theory, however justifiable, can be regarded as final.

William A. Tilden

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.

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.

Scientific knowledge and understanding is a communal achievement, the sum of a multitude of contributions from many different people. Any individual may feel a certain justifiable pride if he knows that he has added one brick to the structure.

C. H. Waddington

It is not extraordinary that young taxonomists are trained like performing monkeys, almost wholly by imitation, and that in only the rarest cases are they given any instruction in taxonomic theory.

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

When asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of His creation, Haldane is said to have answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles."

J. B. S. Haldane

We do not doubt to assert, that air does not serve for the motion of the lungs, but rather to communicate something to the blood...It is very likely that it is the fine nitrous particles, with which the air abounds, that are communicated to the blood through the lungs.

When men began to use their hands and eyes as well as their reason in attempting to get at nature's secrets, doubts arose whether the explanations and hypotheses of the gown-men were not rather strained, and for the most part unsatisfactory.

Thomas Edward Thorpe

I prefer to use the term "theory," with the above understood qualification, viz... a theory in its hypothetical stage.

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The fundamental problem in the origin of species is not the origin of differences in appearance, since these arise at the level of the geographical race, but the origin of genetic segregation. The test of species-formation is whether, when two forms meet, they interbreed and merge, or whether they keep distinct.

When it was suggested to Pasteur that many of his great achievements depended on luck, he replied - I'm sure with more than a little irritation - 'In the field of observation in science, fortune only favours the prepared mind.' It is not by chance that it is always the great scientists who have the luck.

To suppose that the Omnipotent God made a world, found it a failure, and broke it up, and then made it again, and again broke it up, as the Geologists say, is all fiddle faddle. Describing Species of birds and shells, & c., is all fiddle faddle.

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope

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

I had come to the conclusion, that the principal alimentary matters might be reduced to the three great classes, namely the saccharine, the oily and the albuminous.

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

Anthony James Leggett

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