British Scientist Quotes

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

Since we find it difficult to make a suitable model of a certain type, Nature must find it difficult too. This argument neglects the possibility that Nature may be cleverer than we are. It even neglects the possibility that we may be cleverer tomorrow than we are today.

Used with caution, such formulae really are very useful indeed, and indeed they form the professional stock-in-trade of most engineering designers and draughtsmen. There is not the slightest need to be ashamed of using them; in fact we all do. But they must be used with caution.

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)

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

Anthony James Leggett

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.

Never go to a public lavatory in London. I always pee in the street. You may be fined a few pounds for committing a nuisance, but in a public lavatory you risk two years in prison because a policeman in plain clothes says you smiled at him.

A quotation is a polished prefabricated unit of thought or discourse which has many connotations and associations built into it. It is thus like the text for a sermon, serving as a point of departure for many lines of thought.

Alan Lindsay Mackay

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

Although many of the artifices employed in the works before mentioned are remarkable for their elegance, it is easy to see they are adapted only to particular objects, and that some general method, capable of being employed in every case, is still wanting.

When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems.

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

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

The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

Research is a matter of overcoming obstacles. That's what research is about. There are problems. There are difficulties. It's hard to make sense of a collection of information or whatever. Obstacles are the nature of research. Maybe that's why some people give up. There's always an obstacle. You overcome one to find there's another one.

Alexander Dalgarno

The first thoughts, which gave rise to his Principia, he had, when he retired from Cambridge in 1666 on account of the plague. As he sat alone in a garden, he fell into a speculation on the power of gravity; that as this power is not found sensibly diminished at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can rise, neither at the tops of the loftiest buildings, nor even on the summits of the highest mountains, it appeared to him reasonable to conclude that this power must extend much further than was usually thought: why not as high as the moon? said he to himself.

Henry Pemberton

To regard analogy as an aid to the invention of theories is as absurd as to regard melody as an aid to the composition of sonatas.

Norman Robert Campbell

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

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

Light, properly so called, is only a narrowly defined part of a far greater phenomenon, that of radiation in general.... The lengths of [visible] light waves fall between close limits; but the rules of wave motion apply to the infinitesimal waves of X-rays on one hand and to the long radio waves on the other.

William Henry Bragg

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.

The more I think the more bewildered I become.

Charles Galton Darwin

A Corpuscle once did oscillate so quickly to and fro,
He always raised disturbances wherever he did go. He struggled hard for freedom against a powerful foe — An atom — who wouldn't let him go.

In The Renormalization Group method you take a structure you don't understand and convert it to another structure you don't understand. You keep doing it until you finally understand.

Michael Berry (physicist)

A soap bubble is a beautiful thing. It appeals to several senses and to many kinds of minds; it is a source of delight to children, and we who know what somewhat of the mysteries of molecular physics which it helps to reveal look at it with admiration.