A Quote by Charles Francis Richter

Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.

Charles Francis Richter

Quote Topics

Science Active Development Field Less Nothing Predictable Scientific Than

Quote Author

Charles Francis Richter
American - Scientist
April 26, 1900 - September 30, 1985

What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

E. B. White

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.

Donald Rumsfeld

Psychology more than any other science has had its pseudo-scientific no less than its scientific period.

James Mark Baldwin

It has pleased no less than surprised me that of the many studies whereby I have sought to extend the field of general chemistry, the highest scientific distinction that there is today has been awarded for those on catalysis.

Wilhelm Ostwald

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

James Hollis

If we want growth today to be more innovation-driven, more inclusive and more sustainable, then we need a more active state, not a less active one. Yet we still hear the dogma that we should just fix market failure by focusing on science and infrastructure, and to "level the playing field."

Mariana Mazzucato

Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt; and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last; and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second.

Helen Hunt Jackson

One of the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization is the development of the scientific method and the scientific disposition, which entail the development of falsifiable hypotheses about the world and the unwillingness to take unverified and untheorized claims about the world as truth, simply because someone states that they are true.

Heather Mac Donald

For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Faced with this general consideration it will immediately be realized on inquiry into the particular position occupied within this general scheme by the scientific field of catalysis that it is in the first stages of its development.

Wilhelm Ostwald

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

L. P. Jacks

A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory.

Louis Agassiz

What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.