Scientist Quotes

To save biodiversity, we must act before the virgin forest disappears, because no effort at ecosystem rehabilitation, however sophisticated, will ever recreate nature in its primeval state.

We don't want support for scientific research just to keep scientists busy: we want scientists to be looked upon by the public as people who can do things for them that they can't do themselves.

John Cunningham McLennan

The relation between experimentalists and theorists is often one of healthy competition for truth and less healthy competition for fame.

Alvaro De Rujula

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

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

Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.

Alexander Crum Brown

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Michael E. Soulé

No one who attentively examines the progress of any department of Science, save such as are (like Mathematics or Metaphysics) of a purely abstract character, can fail to perceive how much it is dependent upon the perfection of its instruments.

William Benjamin Carpenter

The existing theories of the interaction of elementary particles and fields are all unsatisfactory in one way or another. The imperfections may well arise from the use of wrong dynamical systems to represent atomic phenomena, i.e., wrong Hamiltonians and wrong interaction energies. It thus becomes a matter of great importance to set up new dynamical systems and see if they will better describe the atomic world.

Doesn't it strike you as odd
That a commonplace fellow like Todd
Should spell if you please,
His name with two Ds.
When one is sufficient for God.

Of Alexander R. Todd

It has been remarked in a jocular vein that if H stands for the Hamiltonian, K must stand for the Kamiltonian!

Herbert Goldstein

See all electrons are alike, and presumably leave no trail behind them, we cannot say that atom A loses an electron to atom B and atom C to atom D, but only that Atoms A and C have each lost an electron and atoms B and D have each gained one.

Gilbert N. Lewis

The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operational expenses AND reduce inventories and increase throughput simultaneously.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

The study of adaptation is not an optional preoccupation with fascinating fragments of natural history, it is the core of biological study.

Colin Pittendrigh

"Every single new idea in chemistry has come not from the minds of chemists but from nature...

Humility is indeed a distinctive quality of every scientific mind; not humility before man and man-made images, but before the marvellous universe in which the Earth is only a particle.

Henry Augustus Rowland

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

Men who are capable of modifying their first beliefs are very rare. This ability was one of the reasons for the success of Claude Bernard and Pasteur. Out of a very vivid imagination they forged new hypotheses all the time but abandoned them with equal ease as soon as experience contradicted them.

Adolf von Baeyer

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

In our day but little time elapses between the discovery and its application.

Good researchers use research plans merely as starters and are ready to scrap them at once in the light of actual findings.

The nerves have been hitherto considered as chords that have no powers of contraction within themselves, but only serving as a medium, by means of which the influence of the brain may be communicated to the muscles, and the impressions made upon the different parts of the body conveyed to the brain.

The exterior form and the chemical composition are each other's image.

René Just Haüy

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