French Physicist Quotes

Marie Curie

Pierre Curie

Louis de Broglie

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

Gabriel Lippmann

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Jean Baptiste Perrin

A great discovery does not leap completely achieved from the brain of the scientist, as Minerva sprang, all panoplied, from the head of Jupiter; it is the fruit of accumulated preliminary work.

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it.

History of science played a very important role for me. Before I knew well how to do an experiment, I knew why Joliot has missed the neutron, why his wife missed the fission, why they succeeded in having artificial radioactivity, and even why they almost missed the other things, by doing very nice experiments, but didn't come to the conclusion. That is science. Science is doubt, is research. It is not something which is – and that is the danger of teaching – which is too academic and which the people explain you it is like the logic thing that comes out of the computer, which is not true. You have intuition, you have passion.

Georges Charpak

The facts which our theories enable us to discover, subsist and are linked together long after these theories have disappeared. Out of the materials of former edifices overthrown, new dwellings are constantly being reconstructed.

Lucien Poincaré

Astrophysicists have the formidable privilege of having the largest view of the Universe; particle detectors and large telescopes are today used to study distant stars, and throughout space and time, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the Universe never ceases to surprise us by revealing its structures little by little.

Jean-Pierre Luminet

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

A meaningful physical discussion always requires an operational background. Either this is provided by an existing theory, or you have to give it yourself by the sufficiently explicit description of an experiment that can, at least in principle, be performed.

The exterior form and the chemical composition are each other's image.

René Just Haüy

In the labs, the young make things move, and the older ones follow like parents evolving with their children.

Catherine Bréchignac

It is thus that statistics reveals more and more the inconstancy and the irregularity of much social phenomena, when in lieu of applying it to a great nation altogether, one descends to a province, a town, a village.

Jean Baptiste Perrin

My whole existence has been devoted to science and to teaching, and these two intense passions have brought me very great joy.

Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture.

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

We are not sufficiently astonished by the fact that any science may be possible.

Louis de Broglie

The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered in a sufficiently general way... It is necessary to establish proofs applicable not only to steam engines but to all other heat-engines, irrespective of the working substance and the manner in which it acts.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

A dense film of a conventional surfactant is quite impermeable. On the other hand, a dense film of Janus grains always has some interstices between the grains, and allows for chemical exchange between the two sides; "the skin can breathe". This may possibly be of some practical interest.

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

On graduating from the school, a studious young man who would withstand the tedium and monotony of his duties has no choice but to lose himself in some branch of science or literature completely irrelevant to his assignment.

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics – this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.

You are invited to come to see the Earth turn, tomorrow, from three to five, at Meridian Hall of the Paris Observatory.

The French Academy of Sciences is the receptacle of a crowd of mediocrities and ignoramuses whose places have been made as college professors, herb collectors, village veterinarians and assistant engineers of bridges and roads.

To be in a position to discover the laws which link phenomena together, it is important to make use of the very powerful instrument of calculation ("le calcul ") by means of which one may more easily grasp the relations between bodies.

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.

Gabriel Lippmann

One of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible.

Léon Brillouin