Physicist Quotes

I would like to emphasize strongly my belief that the era of computing chemists, when hundreds if not thousands of chemists will go to the computing machine instead of the laboratory for increasingly many facets of chemical information, is already at hand. There is only one obstacle, namely that someone must pay for the computing time.

Robert S. Mulliken

I've lost any belief I ever had in scientific policy. I don't think you can have scientific policy. I think science is something like weeds, it just grows of its own accord … and if you've got the right atmosphere, the right situation within universities or within places like CSIRO, then it grows and develops of its own accord. And I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them.

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

Evelyn Fox Keller

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works.

Michael E. Mann

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

Alexander Markovich Polyakov

I do not aspire to a historian's standards of completeness, accuracy, or impartiality.

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.

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.

Either we've seen the birth of the universe, or we've seen a pile of pigeon shit.

Arno Allan Penzias

Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory.

While it is true that theory often sets difficult, if not impossible tasks for the experiment, it does, on the other hand, often lighten the work of the experimenter by disclosing cogent relationships which make possible the indirect determination of inaccessible quantities and thus render difficult measurements unnecessary.

I ndeed, one of the most important of our fundamental assumptions must be that the ether not only occupies all space between molecules, atoms, or electrons, but that it pervades all these particles. We shall add the hypothesis that, though the particles may move, the ether always remains at rest.

Hendrik Lorentz

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

From the point of view of the physicist, a theory of matter is a policy rather than a creed; its object is to connect or co-ordinate apparently diverse phenomena, and above all to suggest, stimulate and direct experiment. It ought to furnish a compass which, if followed, will lead to observer further and further into previously unexplored regions.

A Corpuscle once did oscillate so quickly to and fro,
He always raised disturbances wherever he did go. He struggled hard for freedom against a powerful foe — An atom — who wouldn't let him go.

The rational transparency and beauty of the universe are surely too remarkable to be treated as just happy accidents.

John Polkinghorne

Your waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe.

Richard H. Price

All this stuff about traveling around the universe... belongs back where it came from, on the cereal box.

Edward Mills Purcell

The quarks and the stars were here when you came, and they will be here when you go. They have no sense of humor so, if you want a world where more people smile, you will have to fix things yourselves.

Richard E. Taylor

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 Higgs is a very special type of particle - one we've never seen before. It has strange properties that we need to understand. This award was a complete surprise to me. It's really quite humbling and of course I'm delighted to receive it. I'm over the moon to be frank.

Tejinder Virdee

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

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

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

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