Victor Weisskopf Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed into it.

Victor Weisskopf
Self-confidence is an important ingredient that makes for a successful physicist.

Victor Weisskopf
It was absolutely marvellous working for Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought all questions were stupid.

Victor Weisskopf
… conferences with open attendance are very important for the stimulation of young people or other people who are new in the field. … The field of high-energy physics is, as you know, very strongly in the hands of a clique and it is hard for an outsider to enter.

Victor Weisskopf
Deeper insights into the nature of things are best achieved with distance from daily experience.

Victor Weisskopf
Science has become adult; I am not sure whether scientists have.

Victor Weisskopf
It was a heroic period [about 1922-1930] without any parallel in the history of science, the most fruitful and interesting one of modern physics.... In this great period of physics, Bohr and his associates touched the nerve of the universe. The intellectual eye of man was opened to the inner workings of nature.

Victor Weisskopf
Science cannot develop unless it is pursued for the sake of pure knowledge and insight. It will not survive unless it is used intensely and wisely for the betterment of humanity and not as an instrument of domination by one group over another.

Victor Weisskopf
What is a model? A model is like an Austrian timetable. Austrian trains are always late. A Prussian visitor asks the Austrian conductor why they bother to print timetables. The conductor replies "If we did not, how would we know how late the trains are?

Victor Weisskopf
Curiosity without compassion is inhuman; compassion without curiosity is ineffectual.

Victor Weisskopf
Some people maintain that scientific insight has eliminated the need for meaning. I do not agree. The scientific worldview established the notion that there is a sense and purpose in the development of the universe when it recognized the evolution from the primal explosion to matter, life, and humanity. In humans, nature begins to recognize itself.

Victor Weisskopf
In science nothing is absolutely permanent. We have no dogma.

Victor Weisskopf
Science is an important part of the humanities because it is based on an essential human trait: curiosity about how and why of our environment. We must foster wonder, joy of insight.

Victor Weisskopf
Everything is important, but there are degrees of importance.

Victor Weisskopf
It is not surprising that, after a long period of searching and erring, some of the concepts and ideas in human thinking should have come gradually closer to the fundamental laws of this world.

Victor Weisskopf
Science is curiosity, discovering things and asking why.

Victor Weisskopf