Italian Scientist Quotes

Enrico Fermi

Alessandro Volta

Roger Joseph Boscovich

Carlo Rubbia

Bruno Rossi

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

Bruno Pontecorvo

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.

Science is a game: it can be exhilarating, it can be useful, it can be frightfully dangerous. It is a play prompted by man's irrepressible curiosity to discover the universe and himself, and to increase his awareness of the world in which he lives and operates.

Adriano Buzzati-Traverso

One will see a layer of smooth stones, popularly called fluitati [diluvium], and over these another layer of smaller pebbles, thirdly sand, and finally earth, and you will see this repeatedly...up to the summit of the Mountain. This clearly shows that the order has been caused by many floods, not just one.

Antonio Vallisneri

I want to note that, because there is the aforementioned difference between mountain and mountain, it will be appropriate, to avoid confusion, to distinguish one [type] from another by different terms; so I shall call the first Primary and the second Secondary.

Men have no greater enemy than excessive prosperity, for it destroys their mastery over themselves and makes them licentious and vicious, with a hankering after novelties destructive of their own well-being.

Francesco Sansovino

Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.

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

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...

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

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

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.

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

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

Alessandro Volta