Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.
Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us - aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.
I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.
Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over.
Many business leaders are asking fundamental questions about what business they're in, why they are doing it and how it can be used as a means of healing human and natural communities.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces.
You can't blame the person for creating that illness for themselves, because it was a creation. If you could find out how you created it, you might be able to find out a way to let go.
Twenty years ago many chemists would have defended the theory of bond arms as a satisfactory explanation because they had become accustomed to thinking of it as unique and as ultimate.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'
The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string.
Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.
I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity.
...there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons.
I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.
I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad & simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.
In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.
The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
The Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure.
We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.
Of all heroes , Spinoza was Einstein 's greatest. No one expressed more strongly then he a belief in the harmony , the beauty , and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature.
There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it's not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.
Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?
When a scientist says something, his colleagues must ask themselves only whether it is true. When a politician says something, his colleagues must first of all ask, 'Why does he say it?
One indicator of Ernest Lawrence's influence is the fact that I am the eighth member of his laboratory staff to receive the highest award that can come to a scientist - the Nobel Prize.
The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.
If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.
I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.
It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.
The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.
It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.
The major cause for American Negroes intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and thus not remedial to a major degree by improvement in environment.
The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move.
With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.
Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
Having those extra dimensions and therefore many ways the string can vibrate in many different directions turns out to be the key to being able to describe all the particles that we see.
Whether the ice caps melt, or expand - whatever happens - the anthropogenic global warming theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.
I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.