Robert Andrews Millikan Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

It is to lighten man's understanding, to illuminate his path through life, and not merely to make it easy, that science exists.

Robert Andrews Millikan
A crystal and a cell, A jelly fish and a saurian And caves where cavemen dwell. Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod. Some call it evolution And others call it God.

Robert Andrews Millikan
The God of science is the Spirit of rational order, and of orderly development. Atheism as I understand it is the denial of the existence of the spirit. Nothing could therefore be more antagonistic to the whole spirit of science.

Robert Andrews Millikan
We can still look with a sense of wonder and mystery and reverence upon the fundamental elements of the physical world as they have been partially revealed to us in this century. The childish mechanical conceptions of the nineteenth century are now grotesquely inadequate.

Robert Andrews Millikan
The most serious criticism which can be urged against modern laboratory work in Physics is that it often degenerates into a servile following of directions, and thus loses all save a purely manipulative value.

Robert Andrews Millikan
Physics has opened the eyes of mankind so that it can now see in a very new truth new worlds — a marvelous world of electrons, already quite well explored, which underlies our former world of atoms and molecules, a world of quanta, not yet well understood, which lies perhaps behind the ether.

Robert Andrews Millikan
If the beauty, the meaning and the purposes of this life as revealed by both science and religion are all a dream, then let me dream on forever!

Robert Andrews Millikan
The word "electron" was first suggested in 1891 by Dr. G. Johnstone Stoney as a name for the "natural unit of electricity," namely, that quantity of electricity which must pass though a solution in order to liberate at one of the electrodes one atom of hydrogen or one atom of any univalent substance.

Robert Andrews Millikan
Almost every new theory is built like a great mediaeval cathedral, through the addition by many builders of many different elements, one adding a little here and another a little there so that to the eye of a distant observer in the clouds the whole structure seems to move forward in a practically continuous way.

Robert Andrews Millikan
A science grows in the main as does a planet by the process of infinitesimal accretion. Practically every experiment in physics is a modification of an experiment which has gone before.

Robert Andrews Millikan
I suspect that the changes that have taken place during the last century in the average man's fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his concept of religion. in his whole world outlook, are greater than the changes that occurred during the preceding four thousand years all put together.... because of science and its applications to human life, for these have bloomed in my time as no one in history had had ever dreamed could be possible.

Robert Andrews Millikan
A prominent literary writer recently spoke of the electron as "only the latest scientific hypothesis which will in its turn give way to the abra-ca-da-bra of tomorrow."

Robert Andrews Millikan
In science, truth once discovered always remains truth.

Robert Andrews Millikan
Modern science, of the real sort, is slowly learning to walk humbly with its God, and in learning that lesson it is contributing something to religion.

Robert Andrews Millikan
One of the chief inhibitions to human progress arises because of the extreme slowness with which the advances in knowledge become translated into action for the benefit of society as a whole. There is no step more important for the removal of that inhibition than that of providing for intimate contact between the leaders in the fields of pure and applied science.

Robert Andrews Millikan
The chemist in America has in general been content with what I have called a loafer electron theory. He has imagined the electrons sitting around on dry goods boxes at every corner [viz. the cubic atom], ready to shake hands with, or hold on to similar loafer electrons in other atoms.

Robert Andrews Millikan
Just how we fit into the plans of the Great Architect and how much He has assigned us to do, we do not know, but if we fail in our assignment it is pretty certain that part of the job will be left undone. But fit in we certainly do somehow, else we would not have a sense of our own responsibility. A purely materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence.

Robert Andrews Millikan
The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.

Robert Andrews Millikan
Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

Robert Andrews Millikan