Ernest Rutherford - Science Quotes

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All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford
Should a young scientist working with me come to me after two years of such work and ask me what to do next, I would advise him to get out of science. After two years of work, if a man does not know what to do next, he will never make a real scientist.

Ernest Rutherford
Science is divided into two categories, physics and stamp-collecting.

Ernest Rutherford
The year 1896...marked the beginning of what has been aptly termed the heroic age of Physical Science. Never before in the history of physics has there been witnessed such a period of intense activity when discoveries of fundamental importance have followed one another with such bewildering rapidity.

Ernest Rutherford
It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.

Ernest Rutherford
It is essential for men of science to take an interest in the administration of their own affairs or else the professional civil servant will step in — and then the Lord help you.

Ernest Rutherford