A Quote by Erwin Chargaff

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Erwin Chargaff

Quote Topics

Academy Certain Common Ever Field Form His Layman Living Members Outside Own Science Scientist Specialization

Quote Author

Erwin Chargaff
Austrian - Scientist
August 11, 1905 - June 20, 2002

No scientist or student of science, need ever read an original work of the past. As a general rule, he does not think of doing so. Rutherford was one of the greatest experimental physicists, but no nuclear scientist today would study his researches of fifty years ago. Their substance has all been infused into the common agreement, the textbooks, the contemporary papers, the living present.

C.P. Snow

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

Bobby Fischer

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

John Bardeen

We affirm the neutrality of Science ... Science is of no country. ... But if Science has no country, the scientist must keep in mind all that may work towards the glory of his country. In every great scientist will be found a great patriot.

Louis Pasteur

The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his work.

Max Delbruck

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

Joan Didion

In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Common sense invents and constructs no less than its own field than science does in its domain. It is, however, in the nature of common sense not to be aware of this situation.

Albert Einstein

The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.

Giacomo Leopardi

The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.

Daniel Bell

To function effectively, the system scientist must know a considerable amount about the natural world AND about mathematics, without being an expert in either field. This is clearly a prescription for career disaster in today's world of ultra-high specialization.

John L. Casti

As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense.

Luther Burbank

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

John Noble

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

John Noble

I'm a member of the Academy, but I don't know who all the other Academy members are. It's not like a politician who knows who is in the Iowa caucus.