Scientist Quotes

The boundaries between chemistry, biology, physics and medicine are rapidly disappearing. Only a comprehensive understanding of the chemical and physical processes in our cells and organ systems will yield the insights needed to develop rational approaches to the prevention and treatment of disease.

In photosynthesis we are like travelers in an unknown country around whom the early morning fog slowly begins to rise, vaguely revealing the outlines of the landscape. It will be thrilling to see it in bright daylight!

Eugene Rabinowitch

The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.

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.

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

So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character. Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously: attentive to cleanliness, who was a consummate villain.

Benjamin Thompson

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

Felix Ehrenhaft

Freedom is the range of opportunities available to an individual - the more he has to choose from, the freer his choices. Science creates freedom by widening our range of understanding and therefore the possibilities from which we can choose.

David Baltimore

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

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.

Hypotheses are like questions which we put to Nature, but the answers she gives are not simply "yes" and "no;" but it can be so, or it cannot.

Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller

The universe is popping all over the place.

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

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

There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.

Guillermo Gonzalez (astronomer)

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.

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

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

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

To give us the science of motion God and Nature have joined hands and created the intellect of Galileo.

Good ideas, as we have seen, are not always well received, especially if there are too many of them.

Meredith Belbin

[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