Scientist Quotes

Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full...

Théophile de Donder

Science knows no boundaries, and efforts to create barriers – whether to keep new ideas within or to prevent new ones from entering from the outside – have universally proved harmful to progress.

Epidemiology is like a bikini: what is revealed is interesting; what is concealed is crucial.

I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, they simply don't want to change!

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

I am afraid the knockabout comedy of modern atomic physics is not very tender towards our aesthetic ideals. The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades in the films. The music of the spheres has a painful suggestion of — jazz.

Arthur Eddington

Don't be impatient with me. Bear in mind that I hop around among all of you big beasts like a harmless and helpless frog who is afraid of being squashed.

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

Felix Ehrenhaft

Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people.

Paul R. Ehrlich

The persistent pattern of no change within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species — organisms marked with anatomical innovations — had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works.

The standard model longs for the Higgs particle in order to be a sound theory.

The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias.

Richard Arnold Epstein

The physical "reality" is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself.

My whole existence has been devoted to science and to teaching, and these two intense passions have brought me very great joy.

Facts are plentiful enough, but we know not how to class them; many are overlooked because they seem uninteresting: but remember that what led Newton to pursue and discover the law of gravity, and ultimately the laws by which worlds revolve, was - the fall of an apple.

Michael Faraday

A general is a man who takes chances. Mostly he takes a fifty-fifty chance; if he happens to win three times in succession he is considered a great general.

The limited imagination of physicists: When we see a new phenomenon we try to fit it into the framework we already have... It's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.

Richard Feynman

Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists.

David Finkelstein

At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always.

Val Logsdon Fitch

It is imperative to get the smelters to pay a fair price for their power; otherwise, market forces can never induce them to limit their emissions.

It seems likely that in the next few years a combination of antibiotics with different antibacterial spectra will furnish a "cribrum therapeuticum " from which fewer and fewer infecting bacteria will escape.

Alexander Fleming

Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.

Heinz von Foerster

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

It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning.

William Alfred Fowler

It is a fantastic letter. Very understated. He calls it an optical maser, it's as if a maser was made to run in the optical. No flamboyant phrase, just straightforward science.