Favorite Scientist Quotes

[bascule]

Has this been done before? Probably. A quick search didn't find it, so I'm starting a new thread. Ha!

 

Post your favorite quotes from scientists... go!

 

Here's mine:

 

"Now we know that we shall never know"

-- Werner Heisenberg

[ecoli]

"If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin."

 

- Charles Darwin

[ydoaPs]

"'Human' to the discontinuous mind, is an absolute concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil."-Richard Dawkins

[MrMongoose]

"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives"- Charles Hermite

[swansont]

"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right." Robert Park

[iNow]

"So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden cause of things.”

~ Johannes Kepler

[swansont]

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."

-- Galileo Galilei

[Reaper]

* "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

 

* "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

 

 

 

-Both by Richard Feynman

[Michael_H]

* "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."

 

* "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."

 

~Both by Albert Einstein

[CDarwin]

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

 

Mr. Darwin

 

"Show me your teeth, and I will tell you who you are."

 

Georges Cuvier

[blike]

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong"

 

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?"

 

Both from Richard Feynman.

[Fred56]

What this theory does currently have is an embedding of G and one copy of R in E8. The other two copies of R are related to the first by a triality rotation. Under a strict interpretation of the embedding, ..., these other two copies of R do not have the same quantum numbers as the first – so by this interpretation they are not good copies. However, they do have the correct quantum numbers under the triality rotated G. This, admittedly, is unsatisfactory hand waving

--Garret Lisi, (sometime) scientist

 

There is not a glimpse of physics in that paper. You won't find anything like a "Lagrangian", "amplitudes", "masses", "cross section", "quantum corrections", "anomalies", "energy", "force", "Hamiltonian", "entropy", "phase transition", "path integral", "renormalization", "temperature", or other words that you expect in a particle physics paper. When he talks about actions, they're always wrong actions from some previous obscure papers that have clearly nothing to do with observable physics either. Of course, the author also seems to have no clue about quantum aspects of gravity - a unification of gravity with quantum mechanics is not even attempted because the author clearly doesn't know what it means. On the other hand, you find a lot of random assignments of particles to vertices of polytopes - something that you know from papers about the octopi.

--Lubos (el Lobos) Moti, (sometime) personality

[Fred56]

"Il me parait plus naturel et plus conforme aux ideés qui ont toujours heureusement oriente la recherche scientifique de supposer que les transitions quantiques pourront un jour etre interpreteés, peut-etre a láide de moyens analytiques dont nous ne disposons pas encore, comme des processus tres rapides, mais en principe descriptibles en termes d'éspace et de temps, analogues a ces passages brusques d'ún cycle limite aùn autre que l'ón rencontre tres frequemment dans l'étude des phenomenes mecaniques et electromagnetiques non lineáires."

 

--Louis de Broglie, Les ideés qui me guident dans mes recherches (1965)

[Reaper]

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

 

-- Albert Einstein

[ishmael]

"Now we are all sons of bitches."

Oppenheimer after the first successful test of the atom bomb.

[Fred56]

"The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the lights to change." --Joseph Campbell

[dichotomy]

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty… The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." (Albert Einstein, 1954)

[Fred56]

(darn it, that quote en francais I posted needs a few extras between one or two woids, stoopid keyboards... )

láide = l'áide; aùn = a ùn;

 

Roan Stallion

"The atom's bonds breaking,

Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, with recognition

Not praying, self-equaling, the whole to the whole,

the microcosm

Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally,

more utterly, more incredibly conjugate

With the other extreme and greatness; passionately

perceptive of identity..." Robinson Jeffers

[bascule]

Whelp, nobody's posted my favorite Feynman quote yet:

 

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

 

-- Richard Feynman

[revprez]

"The business of business is business" - Alfred P. Sloan

[iNow]

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion. "

 

~Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address

[Fred56]

'Now, finally, what would be the meaning of the word "truth" to a modern scientist? Surely not the meaning it would have for a purpose? Surely not the meaning it would have for a [spiritualist] mystic! For the really great and essential fact about the scientific revelation--the most wonderful and most challenging fact--is that cience does not and cannot pretend to be "true" in any absolute sense. It does not and cannot pretend to be [a] final [answer]. It is a tentative organisation of more "working hypotheses" ("Oh, those scientists!" "Yes I know, but they found the bones") that for the present, appear to take into account, relevant facts [that are] now known.

 

That growth, as long as it lasts, will be the measure of the life of modern ...man, and of [that] world with all its promise that he ...is still bringing into being: ...continuing transformation, not ...petrification and rigidity, and some canonised ..."truth".

 

And so, my friends, we don't know a thing, and not even our science can tell us sooth; for it is no more than, so to say, an eagerness for truths, no matter where their allure may lead. ...According to our sciences, ...nobody knows what is out there at all.'

-Myths to live by Joseph Campbell

[bascule]

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

 

-- Charles Darwin

[DrDNA]

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

 

"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.”

 

Albert Einstein

[YT2095]

"so in effect you Could say we are all made of stardust, on the Flip side you also say we`re all nuclear waste".

 

-Professor Jim Al-Khalili