Scientist Quotes

Most people have no idea how good their body is designed to feel.

It takes very little imagination to believe naively that anything is possible. Any ten-year-old child can believe this. It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what things are possible and what things are impossible.

Milton A. Rothman

When interpreting nature's work, we are obliged frequently to speak of high numbers and small fractions.

George Johnstone Stoney

Art and science can best grow and develop in a society which cherishes freedom and which shows respect for the needs, the happiness and the dignity of human beings.

Carl Ferdinand Cori

Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation.

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

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.

Scientific discovery rarely follows a smooth and orderly course. Like most natural processes it proceeds spasmodically, and important results frequently come only after long-drawn-out, exhausting, and apparently fruitless endeavor, sometimes even almost by what appears to be a lucky chance.

Compare, for instance, the accuracy with which we can describe and foretell the path of a planet with our ignorance of the movements of the atmosphere as dependent on the heat of the sun. The planet keeps to the astronomer's timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

John Henry Poynting

It has been said that all expository books are simply forms of selected plagiarism.

It is of course the ambition of every experimenter... to make a discovery, to sail safely between the Scylla of intellectual prejudice which makes us reject evidence not really integrated without preconceived notions, and the Charybdis of irrelevance which has swallowed many working days spent in pursuit of instrumental artifice.

The periodic law has given to chemistry that prophetic power long regarded as the peculiar dignity of its sister science, astronomy.

Henry Carrington Bolton

Above all, a plant, an oak for example, is an animal. An enormous animal in which live parasites or rather symbionts, an infinite multitude of small microscopic green organisms, of the species of unicellular "algae," cyano-phyceae.

Konstantin Mereschkowski

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

When we try to understand how contemporary Indian food came into being, it is similar to learning about the evolution of language. We place the data available to us in a multidimensional space and study similarities and dissimilarities with other global cuisines.

A group is often slower to see the flame of truth than a single open-minded individual. A group must be conservative and being so may run the danger of attempting to hold with both the old and the new—an impossibility when one is incompatible with the other.

Ernest Everett Just

MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO YEARS Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time by Our Planetary Neighbors.

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

Our planet is not in a special place in the solar system, our Sun is not in a special place in our galaxy and our galaxy is not in a special place in the Universe.

Marcelo Gleiser

The relic is to the past as is the germ to the future.

William Robert Grove

The far spaces of the galaxies are teeming with life; but the life-bearing planets are separated by awesome gaps of space and time. We are lost in space — marooned in the small section of the universe assigned to us.

When I went from academia to a company, they don't care how many committees you are on, how many papers you have. What counts is that you have a product that has an effect. The ego is wiped out. It is so much better.

Katalin Karikó

Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier

There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

A soap bubble is a beautiful thing. It appeals to several senses and to many kinds of minds; it is a source of delight to children, and we who know what somewhat of the mysteries of molecular physics which it helps to reveal look at it with admiration.