Scientist Quotes

A dense film of a conventional surfactant is quite impermeable. On the other hand, a dense film of Janus grains always has some interstices between the grains, and allows for chemical exchange between the two sides; "the skin can breathe". This may possibly be of some practical interest.

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

Each word is a singularity, or is connected with a singularity, in our way of understanding existence.

Léon Rosenfeld

We don't want support for scientific research just to keep scientists busy: we want scientists to be looked upon by the public as people who can do things for them that they can't do themselves.

John Cunningham McLennan

The first characteristic of interest is the fraction of the computational load which is associated with data management housekeeping. This fraction has been very nearly constant for about ten years, and accounts for 40% of the executed instructions in production runs.

No paper is more seminal for the fields of quantum foundations and quantum information than the 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) paper.

Howard M. Wiseman

One result of unimaginative, mechanistic thinking was that societies eventually ceased to burn people at the stake for witchcraft.

George Sudarshan

Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know.

Either we've seen the birth of the universe, or we've seen a pile of pigeon shit.

Arno Allan Penzias

Quantum theory is stunningly successful. Not a single one of the theory's predictions has ever been shown wrong. One-third of our economy depends on products based on it. However, the worldview demanded by quantum theory is not only stranger than we might suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.

Bruce Rosenblum

The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

You can forget facts but you cannot forget understanding.

Every star around us is a favorable target for human migration. You don't have to wait for just those stars that happen to have earthlink planets; they may be very few and far between.

Gerard K. O'Neill

I do not aspire to a historian's standards of completeness, accuracy, or impartiality.

I shall lose no time in repeating and extending these experiments, being satisfied that the grand agents of nature are by the Creator's fiat indestructible, and that whatever mechanical force is expended an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.

James Prescott Joule

The modern history of instruments and the patterns of their use may lack the glamour of the history of our over arching theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, these bubbling, sparking, clanking devices remain the weft and the warp of physics.

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.

Astronomy is probably the oldest of all the sciences. It differs from virtually all other science disciplines in that it is not possible to carry out experimental tests in the laboratory.

To serve in the scientific army, to have shown some initiative, and to be rewarded by the consciousness that in the eyes of his comrades he bears the accredited accolade of successful endeavor, is enough to satisfy the legitimate ambition of every earnest student of nature.

There is no concept in the whole field of physics which is more difficult to understand than is the concept of entropy, nor is there one which is more fundamental.

All the richness of structure observed in the natural world is not a consequence of the complexity of physical law, but instead arises from the many-times repeated application of quite simple laws.

Erwin with his psi can do Calculations quite a few. But one thing has not been seen Just what psi really mean.

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

Knowledge is alive. It creeps, it grows, it crawls, it jumps. It never stays quite still. We add to it. We tear it in pieces. We put it together again, and then it is a different knowledge.

John Lighton Synge

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

The whole history of physics proves that a new discovery is quite likely lurking in the next decimal place.

Floyd K. Richtmyer