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Quotes by Physicist
"There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly."
48
"Strict conservation of energy in the elementary process had thus been confirmed also by a negative experiment."
48
"My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English."
47
"One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them."
47
"No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect."
46
"I studied chemical engineering. I was a good student, but these were the hard times of the depression, my scholarship came to an end, and it was necessary to work to supplement the family income."
46
"Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read."
46
"The application of a strong magnetic field enables the measurement of the energy of the most penetrating particles to be carried out, and the method may be capable of still further extension and improvement."
45
"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."
45
"An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field."
45
"I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose."
45
"In 1971 I returned to the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics."
45
"Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed."
44
"Show me a genuine case of platonic friendship, and I shall show you two old or homely faces."
44
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
44
"During this period, with a series of excellent students, we further studied hyperon decays."
44
"This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack."
44
"There's two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."
44
"It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system."
44
"Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications."
43
"The emitters of the spectral series are without exception single atoms, not compounds of atoms."
43
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
43
"I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value."
43
"I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results."
43
"On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron."
43
"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."
43
"Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations."
42
"There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser."
42
"I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy."
42
"With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us."
42
"Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm."
42
"To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite."
42
"Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition."
42
"Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you."
41
"I feel I learned as much from fellow students as from the professors."
41
"A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision."
40
"Yes, I was a parish priest for five years. I was a curate in a large working class parish in Bristol and the Vicar of a village in Kent."
40
"I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to problems."
40
"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."
40
"At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion."
40
"I reverted easily to my wild state, that is experimentation."
40
"I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto."
40
"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science."
40
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