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Quotes by Physicist
"I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time."
34
"I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists."
33
"Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it."
33
"This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules."
Work,
33
"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."
33
"Heat can also be produced by the impact of imperfectly elastic bodies as well as by friction. This is the case, for instance, when we produce fire by striking flint against steel, or when an iron bar is worked for some time by powerful blows of the hammer."
33
"However, the models also predict unambiguously that the atmosphere is warming faster than the surface of the earth; but all the available observational data unambiguously shows the opposite!"
33
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
33
"The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods."
33
"If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist."
33
"But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up."
33
"My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write."
33
"To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still."
33
"Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer."
33
"Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity."
33
"The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientist, perhaps in the form of a voluntary Hippocratic Oath."
Time,
33
"As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism."
33
"My mother, Dorothy Watson, had met my father in a Greek class at Northwestern University."
33
"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."
33
"In 1958, I was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva."
32
"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."
32
"In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store."
32
"My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win."
32
"In and after 1964 when I began to concern myself with the biological issues, and particularly from 1967 onwards, the extent of the problems over which I felt uneasy increased to such a point that in 1968 I felt a compelling urge to make my views public."
32
"It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years."
32
"I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation."
32
"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth."
32
"As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize."
32
"But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy."
32
"After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun."
32
"I visited the Gymnasium in The Hague and passed my final examination (in the sciences section) in 1943."
32
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