Scientist Quotes

I think there is a need for something completely new. Something that is too different, too unexpected, to be accepted as yet.

Anton Zeilinger

There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.

Allan McLeod Cormack

My starting point is as an academic who always thought nuclear was the answer, but who then looked at the figures and came to an inescapable conclusion that solar-hydrogen is the long-term future. I did not come at this as a green evangelist. I am a reluctant convert.

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.

Science is drawn by its own internal logic, by the development of instruments and ideas, so it's not always possible to predict when specific problems will be solved or specific knowledge acquired.

Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they're worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange ducks trying to understand what this nuclear business is all about and read the respectable journals the CIA leaks information to, please don't get the idea this makes you a more respectable arm chair analyst than anyone else.

Samuel T. Cohen

Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

Ernesto Sábato

The organization of the universe demands that matter abandon itself to the games of chance.

Science, in its pure form, is not concerned with where discoveries may lead; its disciples are interested only in discovering the truth.

Alan Tower Waterman

Human beings are organisms capable of manipulating internal representations of the world by means of concrete operations and can transcend the bounds of their biologically given perceptions. They can liberate themselves and construct a view of reality that conflicts with intuition, yet gives a true, more encompassing view.

To believe something strongly when it is clearly hard to define and prove, and has not been proven, is to be prejudiced.

Nature possesses an order that one may aspire to comprehend.

In talking of evolution, it is common to have in mind a tree.

Russell Stannard

Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Alvin M. Weinberg

Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.

Irving Langmuir

Too much equipment can be, however, something that hampers scientific development. I had the feeling that if there is no equipment present, everybody is forced to simplify his ideas in such a way that the experiments become simple. If there is too much equipment available, he can attack any experiment immediately since all the difficulties will be overcome by putting more money in the equipment. In the long run, some of the equipment becomes so complicated that it is difficult to see how all the parts interact.

Georg von Békésy

I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'

Charles Hard Townes

It would be interesting to use high temperatures - in the billions, which develop during atomic bomb explosions, for conducting synthetic reactions (for example, the formation of helium from hydrogen), which are the source of energy of stars and which could raise the energy liberated during the explosion of basic matter (uranium, bismuth, lead) even higher.

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory.

We are going to become Gods, period. If you don't like it, get off. You don't have to contribute, you don't have to participate but if you are going to interfere with me becoming a God, you're going to have trouble. There'll be warfare.

One day I had the idea of radiation implosion. As in all ideas that have ever popped up in my head, there is no way I can trace the source.

John Clive Ward

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr.