Scientist Quotes

The universe is popping all over the place.

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

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

A national programme which would provide television to about 80% of India's population during the next ten years would be of great significance to national integration, for implementing schemes of economic and social development and for the stimulation and promotion of electronic industry. It is of particular significance for population living in isolated rural countries

Vikram Sarabhai

Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

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

Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained.
It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Michael Shermer

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.

In the absence of a firm theoretical basis for the law [conservation of baryon number], we can only conclude that it is known to be true with great accuracy.

Maurice Goldhaber

The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other.

I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula!

Auguste Laurent

The twofold nature of light as a light-wave and as a light-quantum is thus extended to electrons and, further, to atoms: their wave-nature is asserting itself more and more, theoretically and experimentally, as concurrent with their corpuscular nature.

Arnold Sommerfeld

Men have no greater enemy than excessive prosperity, for it destroys their mastery over themselves and makes them licentious and vicious, with a hankering after novelties destructive of their own well-being.

Francesco Sansovino

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 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.

The arrow of time, through the defining role it plays in everyday life and its intimate link with the origin of the universe, lies at a singular threshold between the reality we experience and the more refined reality cutting-edge science seeks to uncover.

Light propagates and spreads not only directly, through refraction, and reflection, but also by a fourth mode, diffraction.

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

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

Yet the atom, for all that, is not Nature's unit, but ours.

Frederick Soddy

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.

In the bounds of nature, a vacuum, which is nothing, can find no place. There is no power in nature which from nothing could have made the universe, and none which could reduce the universe to nothing: that requires the same virtue.

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

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Dorothy Hodgkin