Physicist Quotes

Science is the locomotive that drives our civilization.

Nicholas Metropolis

We may question, do the European policymakers act morally correct when they do not take serious attempts to prevent the arctic oil drilling.

Syksy Räsänen

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

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 universe is popping all over the place.

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.

People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

We live of novelty in science. So when you do something new, you have to overcome certain beliefs that it cannot be done, that it's not interesting and so on.

Heinrich Rohrer

We are not sufficiently astonished by the fact that any science may be possible.

Louis de Broglie

Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen, As the bearer of these lines, for whom I pray the favor of a hearing will explain in more detail, I have... hit upon a desperate remedy for rescuing the "alternation law".. This is the possibility that there might exist in the nuclei electrically neutral particles, which I call neutrons.

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

The twofold nature of light as a light-wave and as a light-quantum is thus extended to electrons and, further, to atoms: their wave-nature is asserting itself more and more, theoretically and experimentally, as concurrent with their corpuscular nature.

Arnold Sommerfeld

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

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

Evelyn Fox Keller

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.

A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life.

David L. Webster

The constant questioning of our values and achievements is a challenge without which neither science nor society can remain healthy.

Aage Niels Bohr

Physicists have learned that certain questions cannot be asked, not because the level of our knowledge does not yet permit us to find the answer, but because such an answer simply isn't stored in nature.

All our civilization is based on inventions; before invention, men lived on fruits and nuts and pine cones and slept in caves.

Reginald Fessenden

Since we find it difficult to make a suitable model of a certain type, Nature must find it difficult too. This argument neglects the possibility that Nature may be cleverer than we are. It even neglects the possibility that we may be cleverer tomorrow than we are today.

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

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.

"Big Crunch" is... an ugly term which hardly seems appropriate for so important an event as the end of the universe. But there is no convention as yet for a label of the moment of destruction at the end of time, and I am free to borrow the term "omega point."