Scientist Quotes

I'm a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena

Francisco Varela

It was a wonderful mess at that time. Wonderful! Just great! It was so confusing — physics at its best, when everything is confused and you know something important lies just around the corner.

The influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.

Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.

Frederick Soddy

Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained.
It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual.

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

To believe something strongly when it is clearly hard to define and prove, and has not been proven, is to be prejudiced.

Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know.

Coleman used to start his field theory course saying this

I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions.

Richard A. Muller

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

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

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

In principio it is impossible to prove from experiments that something is non-existent.

Felix Ehrenhaft

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.

Measurements of the specific ionization of both the positive and negative particles, by counting the number of droplets per unit length along the tracks, showed the great majority of both the positive and negative particles to possess unit electric charge.

Carl David Anderson

To know the quantum mechanical state of a system implies, in general, only statistical restrictions on the results of measurements. It seems interesting to ask if this statistical element be thought of as arising, as in classical statistical mechanics, because the states in question are averages over better defined states for which individually the results would be quite determined. These hypothetical 'dispersion free' states would be specified not only by the quantum mechanical state vector but also by additional 'hidden variables' - 'hidden' because if states with prescribed values of these variables could actually be prepared, quantum mechanics would be observably inadequate.

John Stewart Bell

If many years go by in a field in which no significant new facts come to light, the field sharpens up the opinions and gives the appearance that the problem is solved.

... when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

K. Barry Sharpless

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

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.

[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.

Francis Maitland Balfour

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.

The arrow of time, through the defining role it plays in everyday life and its intimate link with the origin of the universe, lies at a singular threshold between the reality we experience and the more refined reality cutting-edge science seeks to uncover.

The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.

Most scientists have little enthusiasm for history. The job of the scientist is to make discoveries and develop new ideas. When new ideas prove effective they tend to make old ones obsolete: thus it is not altogether unfair to say that the typical scientist is in the business of creating the future and destroying the past.

Edwin C. Kemble