Favorite Scientist Quotes

[Royston]

Have you been watching 'Atom' YT ?

 

'Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?' Oliver Heaviside

 

 

Edit:

YT2095: Yes indeed I have, second time now, I love that stuff

[smarty_pants]

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" Albert Einstein

[Severian]

"All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial." Ernest Rutherford

 

“The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason” Blaise Pascal

[Trilobite]

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

~ Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

[iNow]

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

~Werner Heisenberg

[Encrypted]

"I love ice-cream."

 

~ Unknown genius

[DrDNA]

"Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations:

(1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long.

(2) All sea-creatures have gills.

These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

 

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

 

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or--to translate the analogy--"If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!"

 

Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)

[bascule]

"Our clocks do not measure time. No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure."

 

-- Seth Lloyd