Scientist Quotes

Ever since quantum phenomena became definitely recognized many attempts were made to picture their mechanism.

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

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.

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

Frederick Soddy

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

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics...would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

Franz Karl Achard

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

Felix Ehrenhaft

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.

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge.

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.

The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.

Donella Meadows

Doing physics is much more enjoyable than just learning it. Maybe 'doing it' is the right way of learning, at least as far as I am concerned.

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.

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

The universe is popping all over the place.

It is the satisfaction we derive from 'going there' in contrast to the satisfaction derived from 'getting there.' Recreation provides 'the pause that refreshes.' It recreates creators.

Russell L. Ackoff

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises - car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change....

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.

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

A national programme which would provide television to about 80% of India's population during the next ten years would be of great significance to national integration, for implementing schemes of economic and social development and for the stimulation and promotion of electronic industry. It is of particular significance for population living in isolated rural countries

Vikram Sarabhai

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

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

It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.

Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.

Martin A. Schwartz

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.