Scientist Quotes

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

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

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.

If some alien called me up [and said]., "Hello, this is Alpha, and we want to know what kind of life you have," — I'd say, waterbased... Earth organisms figure out how to make do without almost anything else. The single nonnegotiable thing life requires is water.

Christopher McKay

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

Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.

Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich

... 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

Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.

Irving Langmuir

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 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.

[Hypotheses were] part of the scaffolding of the building of science [rather] than as belonging either to its foundations, materials, or ornaments.

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)

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

Martin A. Schwartz

Chemical research and mountaineering have much in common. If the goal or the summit is to be reached, both initiative and determination as well as perseverance are required. But after the hard work it is a great joy to be at the goal or the peak with its splendid panorama.

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....

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

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

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

Meredith Belbin

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

Theodosius Dobzhansky

The periodic law has given to chemistry that prophetic power long regarded as the peculiar dignity of its sister science, astronomy.

Henry Carrington Bolton

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

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

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

Francisco Varela

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.

Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier