Scientist Quotes

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live.

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

George Johnstone Stoney

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

Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.

Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich

As soon as you have infinity in mathematics everything breaks down.

It is no longer necessary to inquire as to the cause of the overflow of the Nile, since we know definitely that men have come to the sources of the Nile and have observed the rains there.

I do not plan to come back. I have no reason to come back.. I plan to do my best to help the Chinese people build up the nation to where they can live with dignity and happiness.

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 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.

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.

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.

The achievement of the objective in itself cannot but thrill all chemists, who even before they know the details of the journey can apprehend from their own experience the joys and elations, the disappointments and false hopes, the obstacles overcome, the frustrations subdued, which they experienced who traversed a road to the goal.

Robert Burns Woodward

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

Francisco Varela

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

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.

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....

We are too powerless to make assumptions based only on reasoning. We must beg instruction from Nature herself.

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga

The Darwinian process of continued interplay of a random and a selective process is not intermediate between pure chance and pure determinism, but qualitatively utterly different from either in its consequences.

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.

I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.

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)

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

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.

Facts not explained by the existing theories are probably the most valuable for science, for their study is most likely to lead to its early advancement.

Alexander Butlerov

Scientists are in fact imaginers and artists; they are not free with their ideas; they can work well and hard only at what their thinking accepts and what their feelings are drawn to. Ideas alternate; impossible and often mad ones appear; they swarm and whirl, fuse and sparkle. Scientists live among these ideas and work for them.

Vladimir Vernadsky