Scientist Quotes

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 fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.

Before delivering your lectures, the manuscript should be in such a perfect form that, if need be, it could be set in type. Whether you follow the manuscript during the delivery of the lecture is purely incidental. The essential point is that you are thus master of the subject matter.

It is the satisfaction we derive from 'going there' in contrast to the satisfaction derived from 'getting there.' Recreation provides 'the pause that refreshes.' It recreates creators.

Russell L. Ackoff

When you know you're right, you don't care what others think. You know sooner or later it will come out in the wash.

Barbara McClintock

Our planet is not in a special place in the solar system, our Sun is not in a special place in our galaxy and our galaxy is not in a special place in the Universe.

Marcelo Gleiser

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

The little Daisy, which has painted its 'wee crimson-tipped flowers,' puts the chemist and scientific man to shame, for it has produced its leaf and stem and flowers, and has dyed these with their bright colors from materials which he can never change with all his art.

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge

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

Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.

Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich

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

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

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

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

Frederick Soddy

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

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

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation.

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

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

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

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

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

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.