Italian Physicist Quotes

Enrico Fermi

Alessandro Volta

Roger Joseph Boscovich

Carlo Rubbia

Bruno Rossi

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

Bruno Pontecorvo

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

Alessandro Volta

At least 60% of the warming of the Earth observed since 1970 appears to be induced by natural cycles which are present in the solar system. A climatic stabilization or cooling until 2030-2040 is forecast by the phenomenological model.

Nicola Scafetta

If it turns out that the magnet does not work, or the detector does not track, we cannot blame anybody but ourselves. You have to understand every part in your detector. You have to know what makes it run, how it works.

It will be found that everything depends on the composition of the forces with which the particles of matter act upon one another; and from these forces, as a matter of fact, all phenomena of Nature take their origin.

Roger Joseph Boscovich

Light propagates and spreads not only directly, through refraction, and reflection, but also by a fourth mode, diffraction.

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

A general is a man who takes chances. Mostly he takes a fifty-fifty chance; if he happens to win three times in succession he is considered a great general.

Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition.

For you teach very clearly by your behaviour how slowly and how meagerly our senses proceed in the investigation of ever inexhaustible nature.

Giovanni Battista Beccaria

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

The earth is under a ceaseless rain of particles from space. These cosmic rays, our only material contact with the vast universe outside our planetary system, have excited wonder and eager study...

We are now moving beyond those concepts and the knowledge familiar to us in the first half of this century, and we are entering a world in which science and fantasy intertwine...

It is difficult to find a case where the word "intuition" characterises a human achievement better than in the case of the neutrino invention by Pauli.

Bruno Pontecorvo