Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life will go on. I suppose the aura of the Nobel is such that my life will change, but I don't think I'm going to let it change much. You understand, I'm used to a quiet life.
By allowing the positive ions to pass through an electric field and thus giving them a certain velocity, it is possible to distinguish them from the neutral, stationary atoms.
Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.
A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.
I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.
Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts.
One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.
But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles.
The phenomenon develops calmly, but it is invisible, unstoppable. One feels, one sees it born and grow steadily; and it is not in one's power to either hasten or slow it down.
Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.
The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy... luminous energy.
I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.
Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest.
Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
My interest in matters more directly concerned with the handling of particles was growing, in the meantime, stimulated by many contacts with people understanding accelerators.
We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.
As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'
In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme...and I was not able to solve it.
My decision to come to Bell Telephone Laboratories immediately after obtaining my Ph.D. in 1936 was strongly influenced by the fact that my supervisor would be C. J. Davisson.
Shortly after my Ph.D., Alfred Kastler urged me to accept a teaching position at the University of Paris. I followed his advice and started to teach at the undergraduate level.
It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.
The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape. [On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]
Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.
Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
The earth, in fair and grateful exchange, pays back to the moon an illumination similar to that which it receives from her throughout nearly all the darkest gloom of the night.
He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one's gaze.
The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn.
The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.
Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this action (caeteris paribus) [all else being equal] strongest at the least distance?
Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this Agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.
The deepest level of truth uncovered by science, & by philosophy, is the fundamental truth of unity. At that deepest subnuclear level of our reality, you & i are literally one.
The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.
Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory.
Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.
You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.
Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Most technological advances in our life now come from serendipitous discoveries. That is a contraction of rocket technology and computer technology and atomic clock technology.
I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.
It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.
Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.
Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope.
But scientists on both sides of the iron curtain played a very significant role in maintaining the momentum of the nuclear arms race throughout the four decades of the Cold War.
Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.
The ultimate goal of physicists is to arrive at an equation that explains everything and could fit on a t-shirt. That may happen but the t-shirt would have to be 10-dimensional.
A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.
A related aspect of intelligent consciousness is delay of gratification: the wisdom to accurately predict whether delay rather than acting on impulse will yield greater benefit.
Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain because they don't have coal, oil or hydro power.