Top 1106 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Physicists - Page 4

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning.

You are successful the moment you start moving toward a worthwhile goal.

Scientific theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand in hand.

To climb the highest peaks, to travel through… celestial space, to turn our searchlights upon domains of eternal darkness, that is what makes life worth living.

You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong.

It is a great honor to be awarded a Nobel Prize. This is a wonderful experience for my wife Betty and me. We received congratulations by email, phone and post, many from old friends we had not seen for some time.

According to the kinetic theory of gases, the mean kinetic energy of a molecule is a measure of absolute temperature.

My mother was a high-strung perfectionist. She would check my homework for the slightest imperfection and demand that it be redone if she detected any flaws, which she invariably did. My father, in contrast, was easy going and affable and delighted in helping me with any project.

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.

Phase contrast was not discovered while working with a microscope, but in a different part of optics.

Any device in science is a window on to nature, and each new window contributes to the breadth of our view.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

There's only one earth. And there's no spare.

Time is said to have only one dimension, and space to have three dimensions. ... The mathematical quaternion partakes of both these elements; in technical language it may be said to be 'time plus space', or 'space plus time': and in this sense it has, or at least involves a reference to, four dimensions. And how the One of Time, of Space the Three, Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be.

I believe in God. In fact, I believe in a personal God who acts in and interacts with the creation. I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible.

It is perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called 'exact sciences' which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposite to one another.

Quality doesn't improve by sitting on things.

The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

A completed book exists in its entirety, although we humans read it in a time sequence from the beginning to the end. Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leave the others to write themselves, So God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather his creativity has been seen as permeating equally all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge.

Before you can make a dream come true, you must first have one.

There are no excuses for theoretical physicists not to perform and deliver.

Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; knowledge without compassion is inhuman.

After years of training [as astronaut], you have great confidence in the technology. When you get in your car, you probably feel safe too, even though thousands of people die in car crashes every year.

If you tell yourself something over and over again, right or wrong, it becomes intuitive.

All creeds and opinions are nothing but the mere result of chance and temperament.

Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Calling on each molecule one by one? No way. I just told all of them to be quiet - except for a selected few.

I have always attached great importance to the manner in which an experiment is set up and conducted ... the experiment should be set up to open as many windows as possible on the unforeseen.

A fish probably has no means of apprehending the existence of water; it is too deeply immersed in it.

A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

I wonder how Feynman would feel if he had to be talking to not just a few nuts of this kind but e.g. to 2,500 similar nuts who would be moreover described by the media as good scientists, if not the best ones in the world. ;-) Good for him that he managed to die in time.

In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied research; to me, it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature.

We must understand that the fact of error, demonstrated in subsequent work, does not suggest that ethical lapses are responsible. It is more likely that the source of error is, as the advertisement says, a reflection of the fact that "its dangerous to trifle with Mother Nature".

I remember being fascinated by ants and wasps and other bugs when I was a kid. I'd set out a Coke can and stand back 20 feet and use my telescope to watch wasps land on it.

I don't like saying 'no' to people, and I'm going to have to learn how to say 'no' more.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

The present rate of progress [in X-ray crystallography] is determined, not so much by the lack of problems to investigate or the limited power of X-ray analysis, as by the restricted number of investigators who have had a training in the technique of the new science, and by the time it naturally takes for its scientific and technical importance to become widely appreciated.

The electron: may it never be of any use to anybody!

Any person without invincible prejudice who had the same experience would come to the same broad conclusion, viz., that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur.

Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.

Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.

Science or research is always under pressure to deliver something which can be used immediately for society.

When God said "Let there be light" he surely must have meant perfectly coherent light.

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist."

The only way on earth to multiply happiness is to divide it.

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Learning to see love and to express that love is the purpose of living this life. What's real has love at its heart; the universe is constructed from love, and that love is very much tied to our power of attention and imagination.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Euclid manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.

If you start from nothing, it is very difficult to get anywhere.

Whether or not you reach your goals in life depends entirely on how well you prepare for them and how badly you want them.

There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.

As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree.

I visited the Gymnasium in The Hague and passed my final examination (in the sciences section) in 1943.

Our family was very fond of the University of Iowa. We thought it was a good place to go.

Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to THINK.