Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
The objective of producing useful devices has strongly influenced the choice of the research projects with which I have been associated.
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
If you want to be a physicist, you must do three things-first, study mathematics, second, study more mathematics, and third, do the same.
I didn't have this feeling that I should be a leading actor in the cinema. And I wouldn't want the responsibility of the opening weekend.
There are only two kinds of math books: Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page.
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.
Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge.
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
As a kid I did enjoy building things; learned quickly how to make gun powder. I built sleighs, forts, houses in the back yards of houses.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.
It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.
I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.
The standard model gives us an accuracy of ten decimal digits, this is an amazing success that has never been achieved before in science.
Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.
Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.
I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.
Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds - compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.
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.
It often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find they don't work, so I have to give it up.
Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams.
The assumption that the square of a unit vector is positive unity leads to an algebra whose characteristic quantities are non-associative.
Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining.
If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.
Of course, mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know.
Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.
Listeners instinctively detect that when we lower the usual pitch of our voice, we are sad, and when we raise it, we are angry or fearful.
There is real confusion about what it means to be right and wrong - the difference between what spiritual beliefs are and what science is.
They basically ask their engineers to volunteer some probability figures, then they take the average. This is not science. This is voodoo.
In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
There is nothing more exciting than having a life devoted to fundamental knowledge and to contributing to advance the borders of knowledge.
We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
Knowing the plumbing of the universe, intricate and awe-inspiring though that plumbing might be, is a far cry from discovering its purpose.
Quantum mechanics as it stands would be perfect if we didn’t have the quantum-gravity issue and a few other very deep fundamental problems.
If there is a small rocket on top of a big one, and if the big one is jettisoned and the small one is ignited, then their speeds are added.
It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.
Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y , for some value of Y not equal to X.
Nobody would have ever guessed-I wouldn't have guessed-the extraordinary degree to which you can reduce social violence through meditation.