Scientist Quotes

The universe is popping all over the place.

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

We want a fireworks theory of evolution. The last two thousand million years are slow evolution: they are the smoke and ashes of bright but very rapid fireworks.

Georges Lemaître

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

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

Most people have no idea how good their body is designed to feel.

Great harm is caused by too wide a separation of the disciplines which work toward the perfection of each individual art, and much more by the meticulous distribution of the practices of this art to different workers.

Andreas Vesalius

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

Meredith Belbin

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.

There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

I am an experimenter, or rather I used to be one. Then I stopped working, and since then people think I am a theoretician.

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

Martin A. Schwartz

When we try to understand how contemporary Indian food came into being, it is similar to learning about the evolution of language. We place the data available to us in a multidimensional space and study similarities and dissimilarities with other global cuisines.

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.

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

Whatever notions people may entertain respecting the dignity of the human race, there is no gainsaying the fact that we share with the lower animals the rather humiliating privilege and prerogative of entertaining a great variety of parasites.

Thomas Spencer Cobbold

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.

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

The theory of everything may come in its time, but not until we are certain that Nature has exhausted her bag of performable tricks.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

Each man who receives a liberal education today counts chemistry as one of the indispensable parts of his studies.

Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy

If the Easter pilgrims in Piazza San Pietro were to represent the carriers in a metal, then an insulator would resemble the Antarctic with one solitary traveler. In the abundance of carriers there is an enormous gap between conductors and insulators.

The farther an experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

Irène Joliot-Curie

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

Dorothy Hodgkin