Scientist Quotes

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

It was Einstein who had introduced almost all the revolutionary ideas underlying quantum theory, and who saw first what these ideas meant. His ultimate rejection of quantum theory was akin to Dr. Frankenstein's shunning of the monster he had originally created for the betterment of mankind. Had Einstein not done so, in all likelihood he would be seen as the father of the modern theory.

A. Douglas Stone

The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.

Donella Meadows

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

Dorothy Hodgkin

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.

The French Academy of Sciences is the receptacle of a crowd of mediocrities and ignoramuses whose places have been made as college professors, herb collectors, village veterinarians and assistant engineers of bridges and roads.

The careful experiments of Joule, who developed heat in various ways by the application of mechanical force, establish almost to a certainty, not only the possibility of increasing the quantity of heat, but also the fact that the newly-produced heat is proportional to the work expended in its production.

Rudolf Clausius

Saying that each of two atoms can attain closed electron shells by sharing a pair of electrons is equivalent to saying that husband and wife, by having a total of two dollars in a joint account and each having six dollars in individual bank accounts, have eight dollars apiece!

Kazimierz Fajans

Ever since quantum phenomena became definitely recognized many attempts were made to picture their mechanism.

It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.

Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Freedom is the range of opportunities available to an individual - the more he has to choose from, the freer his choices. Science creates freedom by widening our range of understanding and therefore the possibilities from which we can choose.

David Baltimore

A really good scientist is one who knows how to draw correct conclusions from incorrect assumptions.

Otto Robert Frisch

Anyone who wishes to grow over their lifetime needs criticism.

A Corpuscle once did oscillate so quickly to and fro,
He always raised disturbances wherever he did go. He struggled hard for freedom against a powerful foe — An atom — who wouldn't let him go.

With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem!

Knowledge is encoded in models. Models are synthetic sets of rules, and pictures, and algorithms providing us with useful representations of the world of our perceptions and of their patterns.

Didier Sornette

Most scientists have little enthusiasm for history. The job of the scientist is to make discoveries and develop new ideas. When new ideas prove effective they tend to make old ones obsolete: thus it is not altogether unfair to say that the typical scientist is in the business of creating the future and destroying the past.

Edwin C. Kemble

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.

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.

We are too powerless to make assumptions based only on reasoning. We must beg instruction from Nature herself.

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga

Aging and death do seem to be what Nature has planned for us. But what if we have other plans?

Bernard L. Strehler

Ask anyone today working on foundational questions in quantum theory and you are likely to hear that there is still no consensus on many of these questions—all the while, of course, everybody seems to be in perfect agreement on how to apply the quantum formalism when it comes to making experimental predictions.

Maximilian Schlosshauer

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

When I went from academia to a company, they don't care how many committees you are on, how many papers you have. What counts is that you have a product that has an effect. The ego is wiped out. It is so much better.

Katalin Karikó