Scientist Quotes

The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation.... The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another.

What are galaxies? No one knew before 1900. Very few people knew in 1920. All astronomers knew after 1924.

Anyone who wishes to grow over their lifetime needs criticism.

Chymistry is an Art that teaches how to separate the different substances which are found in Mixt Bodies...

As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees's dog.

Steven Weinberg

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

Human power, which mounted slowly indeed through the eons of prehistory and somewhat more rapidly after the advent of the sword and pen, has gathered momentum with logarithmic sweep since the dawn of modern science. Today it seems to be rocketing into outer space with the incredible energy of atomic fission.

H. Bentley Glass

It is from long experience chiefly that we are to expect the most certain rules of practice, yet it is withal to be remembered, that observations, and to put us upon the most probable means of improving any art, is to get the best insight we can into the nature and properties of those things which we are desirous to cultivate and improve.

My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment.

William Shockley

The concept of "free radicals" was not known in 1920 — well perhaps in politics, but not in chemistry.

Herman Francis Mark

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

An optical unit has been devised which will convey optical images along a flexible axis. The unit comprises a bundle of fibres of glass, or other transparent material, and it therefore appears appropriate to introduce the term 'fibrescope' to denote it.

Harold Horace Hopkins

Indicative of the depth of mathematics lurking behind physicists' conjectures is that fact that the properties that one would like to establish about the renormalization theory of critical circle maps might turn out to be related to number-theoretic abysses such as the Riemann conjecture....

Predrag Cvitanović

It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system.

J. R. Partington

Remote and imperturbable, the lives of whales are somehow enough to match any fantasy humanity can create. They are what we have lost, what we yearn for.

Used with caution, such formulae really are very useful indeed, and indeed they form the professional stock-in-trade of most engineering designers and draughtsmen. There is not the slightest need to be ashamed of using them; in fact we all do. But they must be used with caution.

Physical causality can be traced directly to the existence of a simple initial condition of the universe. But how does that initial condition enter into the theory?

Murray Gell-Mann

Ideas, like large rivers, never have just one source. Just as the waters of a river near its mouth is composed largely of the waters of many tributaries, so an idea, in its final form, is composed largely of later additions.

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

Nations consist of people. And with their effort, a nation can accomplish all it could ever want.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The solution of the measurement problem is twofold. First, any observation or measurement requires a macroscopic measuring apparatus. A macroscopic object is also governed by quantum mechanics, but has a large number of constituents, so that each macroscopic state is a combination of an enormous number of quantum mechanical eigenstates. As a consequence the quantum mechanical interference terms between two macroscopic states virtually cancel and only probabilities survive. That is the explanation why our familiar macroscopic physics, concerned with billiard balls, deals with probabilities rather than probability amplitudes.

Nico van Kampen

It is of course the ambition of every experimenter... to make a discovery, to sail safely between the Scylla of intellectual prejudice which makes us reject evidence not really integrated without preconceived notions, and the Charybdis of irrelevance which has swallowed many working days spent in pursuit of instrumental artifice.

The fossil record says eloquently that profuse evolution had indeed occurred over millions of years, but the data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms.

Hampton L. Carson (biologist)

I was following an old idea in science: "If you can't understand a phenomenon, look for more examples of that phenomenon."

Martin Lewis Perl

Mathematics is the natural language of theoretical physics. It is the irreplaceable instrument for the penetration of realms of physical phenomena far beyond the ordinary experience upon which conventional language is based.

Julian Schwinger