Scientist Quotes

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.

Scientific curiosity can be satisfied much more easily by reading the publications of others than by working in the lab. It may take years to prove by experimentation what we can learn in the few minutes needed to read the published end result. So let us not fool ourselves; the driving force is hardly sheer curiosity.

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

Martin A. Schwartz

... when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

K. Barry Sharpless

I was following an old idea in science: "If you can't understand a phenomenon, look for more examples of that phenomenon."

Martin Lewis Perl

A scientist who uses only logical reasoning from 'self-evident' principles will soon find himself in a cul-de-sac - like a blind landscape artist.

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

The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether.

Robert B. Laughlin

Above all, a plant, an oak for example, is an animal. An enormous animal in which live parasites or rather symbionts, an infinite multitude of small microscopic green organisms, of the species of unicellular "algae," cyano-phyceae.

Konstantin Mereschkowski

The farther an experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

Irène Joliot-Curie

The history of science has proved that fundamental research is the lifeblood of individual progress and that the ideas which lead to spectacular advances spring from it.

Edward Appleton

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.

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

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

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions.

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

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

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

Each man who receives a liberal education today counts chemistry as one of the indispensable parts of his studies.

Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy

Man's intellectual development has extended for a period of at least 5,000 years. However, it has been only during the past three centuries that scientists have realized their real objectives and have learned to use what we designate the scientific method.

Although quantum theory involves the use of nonlocal states, such as wave packets and entangled states, there is nothing in the theory, or in the real world so far as it is accurately described by quantum theory, that corresponds to the sorts of instantaneous nonlocal influences which have often been thought to arise in the situation envisaged in the EPR paradox, or implied by the fact that quantum theory violates Bell inequalities.

Robert Griffiths

Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained.
It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual.

When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems.

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.