Physicist Quotes

A scientist has the additional responsibility that comes with being a specialist: explaining science to the public, advising of its usefulness and benefits, and warning of its dangers and disadvantages. This is the responsibility of any specialist.

Although most physicists today place the probability of the existence of tachyons only slightly higher than the existence of unicorns, research into the properties of these hypothetical FTL [faster than light] particles has not been entirely fruitless.

The influence of science on men's lives comes in two rather different ways — one through the ideas themselves, and the other through their material consequences.

George Paget Thomson

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.

Evelyn Fox Keller

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.

Not everyone would be willing to say that he believes in the existence of the neutrino, but it is safe to say there is hardly one of us who is not served by the neutrino hypothesis as an aid in thinking about beta-decay process.

H. Richard Crane

Ex libro lapidum historia mundi — from the book of rocks comes the history of the Earth.

Luis Walter Alvarez

We are quickly approaching the end of the millennium and the 'magical' year 2000. Many futurologists in the sixties thought science and technology would offer man unprecedented possibilities for solving his problems. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the implosion of the Eastern Block also created, just a, few years ago, grand expectations. The dream did not come true, however. Rather than ending up in a technological paradise and a peace-loving world, we woke up in a torn world with virtually unsolvable environmental problems and agonising social conditions.

The modern history of instruments and the patterns of their use may lack the glamour of the history of our over arching theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, these bubbling, sparking, clanking devices remain the weft and the warp of physics.

The theory of quanta is similar to other victories in science; for some months you smile at it, and then for years you weep.

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

Ask anyone today working on foundational questions in quantum theory and you are likely to hear that there is still no consensus on many of these questions—all the while, of course, everybody seems to be in perfect agreement on how to apply the quantum formalism when it comes to making experimental predictions.

Maximilian Schlosshauer

The universe is popping all over the place.

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.

The theory of everything may come in its time, but not until we are certain that Nature has exhausted her bag of performable tricks.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

This heat [developed after fission stops in a reactor] is like the still thrashing tail of a dead dragon.

Frank N. von Hippel

Meaning does not reside in the mathematical symbols. It resides in the cloud of thought enveloping these symbols. It is conveyed in words; these assign meaning to the symbols.

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

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

We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.

Alexander Markovich Polyakov

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Gregory Benford

Neither physical science nor psychology can ever 'explain' human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.

Nevill Francis Mott

The scientific paradox is only an exception to some familiar but too inclusive generalization. It, therefore, has both the appeal of the riddle and the charm of surprise — the surprise, the instant the truth is seen, of a sudden and unexpected discovery....

William Jackson Humphreys

In fact, there really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

All science has its origin in the needs of life.