Scientist Quotes

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.

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

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

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

Good researchers use research plans merely as starters and are ready to scrap them at once in the light of actual findings.

Scientific knowledge and understanding is a communal achievement, the sum of a multitude of contributions from many different people. Any individual may feel a certain justifiable pride if he knows that he has added one brick to the structure.

C. H. Waddington

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

It has been remarked in a jocular vein that if H stands for the Hamiltonian, K must stand for the Kamiltonian!

Herbert Goldstein

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: Atoms cannot be seen. To show that the world was made of particles a million times smaller than objects visible to the naked eye was so difficult that their existence was not established beyond reasonable doubt until the end of the nineteenth century.

I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula!

Auguste Laurent

Slowly the molecules enmeshed in ordered asymmetry. A billion years passed, aeons of trial and error. The life message took form, a spiral, a helix, repeating itself endlessly, Swathed in protein, nurtured by enzymes, sheltered in membranes, laved by salt water, armored with lime.

Thomas H. Jukes

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

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

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.

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

Great Britain may certainly continue to uphold her envied supremacy, sustained by her coal, iron, capital, and skill, if, acting on the Baconian axiom, " Knowledge is Power," she shall diligently promote moral and professional culture among all ranks of her productive population.

The Admiralty sent the Beagle to South America with Darwin on board not because they were interested in evolution but because they knew that the first step to understanding (and, with luck, controlling) the world was to make a map of it. The same is true of the genes.

Steve Jones (biologist)

I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe.

Clifford A. Pickover

We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors.

Joshua Lederberg

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.

It takes very little imagination to believe naively that anything is possible. Any ten-year-old child can believe this. It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what things are possible and what things are impossible.

Milton A. Rothman

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.

The really fundamental things have a way of appearing to be simple once they have been stated by a genius...

George Yuri Rainich

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live.