Scientist Quotes

Creativity makes life valuable. Man is the sole creator; he stands out from the swarming masses of petty little folks. It doesn't matter what kind of creativity it is - whether scientific or socio-political - it's of equal value.

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.

I had come to the conclusion, that the principal alimentary matters might be reduced to the three great classes, namely the saccharine, the oily and the albuminous.

The fossil record says eloquently that profuse evolution had indeed occurred over millions of years, but the data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms.

Hampton L. Carson (biologist)

Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.

Alexander Crum Brown

This is physical chemistry, formerly a colony, now a great, free land.

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff

The concept of "free radicals" was not known in 1920 — well perhaps in politics, but not in chemistry.

Herman Francis Mark

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palaeontology, and of geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible.

James Dewey Watson

The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation.... The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another.

There was once an Editor of the Chemical Society, given to dogmatic expressions of opinion, who once duly said firmly that 'isomer' was wrong usage and 'isomeride' was correct, because the ending 'er' always meant a 'do-er' 'As in water?' snapped Sidgwick.

The relation between experimentalists and theorists is often one of healthy competition for truth and less healthy competition for fame.

Alvaro De Rujula

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

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

As in common life he who best knows how to meet the many difficulties and to utilise the various opportunities which life presents is the successful man, so in scientific discovery he is successful who is able to seize upon and rightly understand the meaning of the phenomena which all eyes witness but only those of the seer can interpret.

Henry Roscoe (chemist)

My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment.

William Shockley

The separation of the laws of nature among the different sciences is a human conceit; nature itself is an integrated whole.

Life isn't about the final destination or the accomplishments and accolades; it's about the journey and the opportunities for learning—and how we grow as a result.

Theories are like crutches; to prove that they are good, we must make use of them and walk.

Jean-Baptiste Dumas

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Michael E. Soulé

Good researchers use research plans merely as starters and are ready to scrap them at once in the light of actual findings.

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!

Kathleen Lonsdale

Physicists might eventually be able to come up with a grand unification theory that encompasses not just subatomic particles and the basic elements, but the code of life as well. Who knows? Life elsewhere in the universe may even be five feet tall and standing on two legs.

Cyril Ponnamperuma

One does not really understand a scientific problem unless one knows at least in rough outline how it came to be formulated.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

One day I had the idea of radiation implosion. As in all ideas that have ever popped up in my head, there is no way I can trace the source.

John Clive Ward

A generalization is a mountain of observations; from the summit the outlook is broad. The great observer climbs to the outlook, while the mere thinker struggles to imagine it.

Charles Sedgwick Minot