Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration.
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
Learning to see love and to express that love is the purpose of living this life. What's real has love at its heart; the universe is constructed from love, and that love is very much tied to our power of attention and imagination.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
The Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more propositions [than we can ever know]. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty.
Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity... The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable.
One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not been written.
A great unification is now taking place between science and spirituality. The most advanced discoveries of modern science are rising to reaffirm the timeless wisdom of the great religious and spiritual traditions of every culture.
Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what were dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.
Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.
Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
For in 1900 all electromagnetic radiation of longer wavelengths was already known at least to the extent that one could not seek in it the more striking characteristics of X-rays such as, for example, the strong penetrating power.
Without Jupiter cleaning out the early solar system, the Earth would be pock-marked with meteor collisions. We would suffer from asteroid impacts every day. CNN studios would probably be a gigantic crater it if wasn't for Jupiter.
Rutherford is a man you can rely on; he comes regularly and enquires how things are going and talks about the smallest details - Rutherford is such an outstanding man and really interested in the work of all the people around him.
The knowledge and understanding of the world which science gives us and the magnificent opportunity which it extends to us to control and use the world for the extension of our pleasure in it has never been greater than it now is.
If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.
Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.
I want to marry Arline because I love her - which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it. I want to take care of her. I am anxious for the responsibilities and uncertainties of taking care of the girl I love.
From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
After I had written a paper or letter for Bohr, I always had the impression that I had learned something which I could use for my own work. And somehow, I never felt that I had too little time for my own work. I always found time.
Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street.
I value my correspondence with writers...I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy - but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
I once knew an otherwise excellent teacher who compelled his students to perform all their demonstrations with incorrect figures, on the theory that it was the logical connection of the concepts, not the figure, that was essential.
There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives.
The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them. What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold "precious," and earth and soil "base"?
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to fill bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.
Our relationships as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a beautiful woman - we should accept with gratitude any favours she offers, but we should not expect too much nor believe all that is said.
Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition.
Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch - which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.
Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.
It's time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.
One may say that in a state of science where fundamental concepts have to be changed, tradition is both the condition for progress and a hindrance. Hence, it usually takes a long time before the new concepts are generally accepted.
Oh, love is very much a physical thing.... I realize that it's very complicated, and I'm sure it can't be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it's very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.
Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That's a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you're not undermining just that, you're undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society.
As a boy, I was deeply interested in scientific ideas, electrical and mechanical, and I read almost everything I could find on the subject. I was attracted more by the hardware and construction aspects than by the scientific issues.
We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something-a trace-which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.
Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.
Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
The greatest contributor to the feeling of tension and fear of war arose from the power of the bombing aeroplane. If all nations would consent to abolish air bombardment . . . that would mean the greatest possible release from fear.
Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas........scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian... It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind.
We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.
A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.