Top 1106 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Physicists - Page 2

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. Izzy, she would say, did you ask a good question today? That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist.

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.

In order to change our mode of action, we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us.

I'd be perfectly happy with a mathematically precise description of how time began. I see science and religion as being two completely different things. I don't see science as relevant to the question of whether or not there's a God.

Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.

I had therefore, no hesitation in giving all the information I had, even though occasionally I tried to concentrate mainly on giving information about the results of my own work.

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.

On even the worst days, when nothing was working at the lab, I knew that at home I would find warmth, peace, companionship, and encouragement. As a consequence, the next day would surely be better.

We can't avoid age. However, we can avoid some aging. Continue to do things. Be active. Life is fantastic in the way it adjusts to demands; if you use your muscles and mind, they stay there much longer.

A distinction between renewable and not renewable energy is academic.

Human progress has always been driven by a sense of adventure and unconventional thinking.

Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.

The magnetic cleavage of the spectral lines is dependent on the size of the charge of the electron, or, more accurately, on the ratio between the mass and the charge of the electron.

I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.

There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.

My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including 4th of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand.

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake.

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power and the more systematic persecution of the Jews followed quickly. Laws were enacted which excluded Jewish children from higher education in public schools.

Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow.

My father was a teacher of the Russian language and literature in high school.

While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave

A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected.

During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes.

It's childish, but it still gives me great pleasure to see high-res pictures everyone told me would be impossible.

People are saying I don't need science, I have everything, but everything is based on science.

What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist. As long as you're using general relativity and quantum mechanics you are forced to conclude that God exists.

Death is the end of a stage, not the end of the journey. The road stretches on beyond our comprehension.

The deepest level of truth uncovered by science, & by philosophy, is the fundamental truth of unity. At that deepest subnuclear level of our reality, you & i are literally one.

I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application.

After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.

Science is to do research because of the target's fascinating and interesting characteristics.

These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.

In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.

The material particle nature of primary cosmic radiation has been confirmed, although the processes turned out to be extraordinarily more complicated than we had assumed.

It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.

My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.

When things get tough, there are two things that make life worth living: Mozart, and quantum mechanics

Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.

Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.

A scientific theory is a tool and not a creed.

Time doesn't flow at the same rate for everyone. You can change time. You can slow it down, you can speed it up.

Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.

An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed.

Truth in science is always determined from observational facts.

The total energy of the universe is constant; the total entropy is continually increasing.

The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.

A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries.

The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well-prepared to receive them.

Forgiveness is better than revenge, for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge is the sign of a savage nature.

Stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live

Man, made after God's image, was a nobler creation than twinkling sparks in the sky, or than the larger and more useful lamp of the moon.

I strongly believe in the existence of God, based on intuition, observations, logic, and also scientific knowledge.

Believe in God, in His providence, in a future life, in the recompense of the good; in the punishment of the wicked; in the sublimity and truth of the doctrines of Christ, in a revelation of this doctrine by a special divine inspiration for the salvation of the human race.

From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.