Scientist Quotes

The universe is popping all over the place.

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

Rudolf Ladenburg

Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier

As in common life he who best knows how to meet the many difficulties and to utilise the various opportunities which life presents is the successful man, so in scientific discovery he is successful who is able to seize upon and rightly understand the meaning of the phenomena which all eyes witness but only those of the seer can interpret.

Henry Roscoe (chemist)

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

Science offers us not only a mass of phenomena to be observed, but also a body of truths which have been deduced from these observations; and, without the power of drawing correct inferences from the data acquired, exact observations would be of little value.

Josiah Parsons Cooke

A group is often slower to see the flame of truth than a single open-minded individual. A group must be conservative and being so may run the danger of attempting to hold with both the old and the new—an impossibility when one is incompatible with the other.

Ernest Everett Just

Slowly the molecules enmeshed in ordered asymmetry. A billion years passed, aeons of trial and error. The life message took form, a spiral, a helix, repeating itself endlessly, Swathed in protein, nurtured by enzymes, sheltered in membranes, laved by salt water, armored with lime.

Thomas H. Jukes

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.

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.

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.

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

Martin A. Schwartz

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

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.

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.

Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.

Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich

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.

When interpreting nature's work, we are obliged frequently to speak of high numbers and small fractions.

George Johnstone Stoney

To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.

What counts, I found, is not what you cover, but what you uncover. Covering subjects in a class can be a boring exercise, and students feel it. Uncovering the laws of physics and making them see through the equations, on the other hand, demonstrates the process of discovery, with all its newness and excitement, and students love being part of it.

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics...would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

Franz Karl Achard

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

Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge.

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

Dorothy Hodgkin