German Physicist Quotes

Albert Einstein

Max Planck

Werner Heisenberg

Wilhelm Röntgen

Max Born

Heinrich Hertz

Hans Bethe

Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.

I fully agree with you concerning the pseudo-science of astrology. The interesting point is that this kind of superstition is so tenacious that it could persist through so many centuries.

Albert Einstein

All our suffering comes from a deficiency to stand up for our beliefs.

Only after the atom has lost the last sensible quality does its true meaning for the physical world view become clear; the unity — real, though remote from our immediate perception — of all that our perception knows only as a multitude of appearances is systematically held together and symbolically represented in it, but not mechanically explained.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

Ideas, like large rivers, never have just one source. Just as the waters of a river near its mouth is composed largely of the waters of many tributaries, so an idea, in its final form, is composed largely of later additions.

A scientific man, in so far as he influences the progress of science cannot be far ahead of his time, and though his writings may be read and admired centuries after his death, he will have written in vain if he has not been appreciated by his contemporaries or by those who immediately followed.

Arthur Schuster

Concepts like these can seem remote, until you explain with analogies taken from everyday life. But unfortunately some ideas do not lend themselves to familiar analogies.

To get information for myself and for others direct from nature gives me so much more satisfaction than to be always learning it from others and for myself alone.

What good does all scientific progress do if it cannot be communicated? Do we really understand the world if we cannot explain it without the requirement of long, demanding studies?

Martin Bojowald

In closing, I should like to cite a line from William Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand - - - and allude to a possible parallel to see worlds in an electron.

Hans Georg Dehmelt

The increase of scientific knowledge lies not only in the occasional milestones of science, but in the efforts of the very large body of men who with love and devotion observe and study nature.

There are many examples in physics showing that higher precision revealed new phenomena, inspired new ideas, or confirmed or dethroned well-established theories.

In electron microscopy, the difficulties took considerably more time to surmount, and therefore the doubters held the field for a longer period. I can, however, also confirm from my own experience the observation of my colleagues that the doubt of the others has the advantage of leaving the field uncrowded. Mostly, this is understood only much later, in the beginning one is very disappointed.

Generally speaking it is better, where possible in natural science, to study objects of research independently of the accidents of their historical development.

Doing physics is much more enjoyable than just learning it. Maybe 'doing it' is the right way of learning, at least as far as I am concerned.

You need only a sheet of paper and so mathematics starts.

While it is true that theory often sets difficult, if not impossible tasks for the experiment, it does, on the other hand, often lighten the work of the experimenter by disclosing cogent relationships which make possible the indirect determination of inaccessible quantities and thus render difficult measurements unnecessary.

It is usually the fate of good physical theory that after its initial success, difficulties or limitations of its applicability become apparent. Eventually it is superseded by a better theory in which some of the difficulties are removed or which has a wider field of application, as the case may be.

Human beings are organisms capable of manipulating internal representations of the world by means of concrete operations and can transcend the bounds of their biologically given perceptions. They can liberate themselves and construct a view of reality that conflicts with intuition, yet gives a true, more encompassing view.

The physicist in preparing for his work need three things, mathematics, mathematics, and mathematics.

Wilhelm Röntgen

Probably in most education systems in a sense we are stuck with the disciplines as we created them last, last century and before that.

Horst Ludwig Störmer

The careful experiments of Joule, who developed heat in various ways by the application of mechanical force, establish almost to a certainty, not only the possibility of increasing the quantity of heat, but also the fact that the newly-produced heat is proportional to the work expended in its production.

Rudolf Clausius

In Physics... as in every other science, common sense alone is not supreme; there must also be a place for Reason.

There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

The universe is more than merely an accretion of electrons, quarks, and galaxies, more than space and time. The complex, interrelated world of the earth which created us is part of it. It is our duty not only to ourselves to preserve this world. The universe itself imposes this task on us.

Harald Fritzsch