J. Robert Oppenheimer - Science Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

View all J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We live today in a world in which poets and historians and men of affairs are proud that they wouldn't even begin to consider thinking about learning anything of science, regarding it as the far end of a tunnel too long for any wise man to put his head into.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The day is long past - if indeed it ever existed except in legend - when the whole of science was the expert province of any one man.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
One thing science can do, and rarely does: it can correct the inherited views that it has by accident at another stage given to common sense, and which turn out to be not true.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Science is not skepticism. It is not the practice of science to look for things to doubt.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Whatever the individual motivation and belief of the scientist, without the recognition from his fellow men of the value of his work, in the long term science will perish.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The true responsibility of a scientist... is to the integrity and vigor of his science. And because most scientists, like all men of learning, tend in part also to be teachers, they have a responsibility for the communication of the truths they have found.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable and the unknown is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of all forms of art.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
A subject is much harder to understand when no one understands it. The world is really an open place, but we start with such crude and limited experience, and our minds are so determined by that experience, that when science carries us into new domains we are not always prepared for what we encounter, and we are floored by it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
In fact, most people — when they speak of Science as a good thing — have in mind such Technology as has altered the condition of their life.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
A change in science, whether novelty or discovery, when properly understood, when the linguistic problem is adequately solved, will even then provide only a hunch, a starting point for looking at an area of experience other than the science in which it was nourished and born.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Distrust all the philosophers who claim that by examining science they come to the results in contradiction with common sense. Science is based on common sense; it cannot contradict it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Often the very fact that the words of science are the same as those of our common life and tongues can be more misleading than enlightening, more frustrating to understanding than recognizably technical jargon.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Manifestly not every finding leads straight to invention; but it is hard to think of major discoveries about nature; major advances in science, which have not had large and ramified practical consequences.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We probably have no very good idea today of the range of problems that will be accessible to science.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

J. Robert Oppenheimer