Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In science it is not enough to think of an important problem on which to work. It is also necessary to know the means which could be used to investigate the problem.
One of the ways we interact with other human beings and form social bonds is through touch, and probably most of us are not aware of the extreme importance of touch.
You have to have passion for a subject to write about it. You can't expect your readers to feel any excitement if it's nothing but a boring writing exercise for you.
I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.
Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.
There is no doubt that I, also, had long been aware of the problem, i.e. producing X-ray interferences, before the inherent difficulties had finally been surmounted.
The thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you are constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics - you can do magic.
Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.
To take all that we are and have and hand it over to God may not be easy; but it can be done; and when it is done, the world has in it one less candidate for misery.
I think it's [concern about global warming] mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves.
We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!
From a long view of the history of mankind the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.
Under these conditions it is not astonishing that learning was highly prized; in fact, my parents made sacrifices to be able to give their children a good education.
In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.
There are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.
Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.
Personally I would like to see that the nuclear age, in terms of power, does come, because there's no long-term future for developing countries without nuclear power.
Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.
Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.
There is a time for scientists and movie stars and those who have flown the atlantic to restrain their opinions lest they be taken more seriously than they should be.
So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what's likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.
Our research is so complex that the resources of a single region of the world are no longer enough - both intellectually and economically, it must be a global effort.
You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.
I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.
Teaching teaches not only the students, it also teaches the teacher, and physics is so full of complications that you can't in your career have thought of everything.
When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.
Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.
I had this illusion that if I kind of dressed badly that I wouldn't stand out. You know, so I actually went out of my way to not look different to the extent I could.
The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.
There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
The first interview I gave to the press was in 1987 when some people thought a previous machine at Cern, called LEP, might have enough energy to produce the particle.
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.
In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.
People want to know about what's going on with what's in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. It's a lot of curiosity out there.
In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god.
The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.
The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung ... corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.
As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.
A good plan will therefore include alternative actions, the choice between them being left open until the passage of time indicates which is feasible and which is not.
A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
[On the Gaussian curve, remarked to Poincaré:] Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.
Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.
It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.
The various reasons which we have enumerated lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element which we propose to give the name of radium.
The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.