Best 423 quotes in «scientist quotes» category

I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record. Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good.

{In a letter to his friend Rudolf Wagner} I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not.

if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in­stance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

Le savant doit ordonner ; on fait la science avec des faits comme une maison avec des pierres ; mais une accumulation de faits n'est pas plus une science qu'un tas de pierres n'est une maison. The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

In a nice little house in Atro City there lived a man called Doktor Gleichstein. He was a kind of scientist, and he was very good at his job, which is why he always worked from home. He looked a little funny because he kept losing his eyebrows. Quantum Physics, is sort of like ordinary Physics, only you tend to spend a lot more time looking for the cat. He worked in the sitting room because he’d blown the garage up once already. Apparently a lot of things happened by accident in Quantum Physics.

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way...why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do—and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view.

In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a “discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

In the mind of a scientist, beauty is simplicity. The most elegant experiment is the one that takes no time to set up and gives the answer to every question.

In the last four days I have got the (results) given by Tantalum, Chromium, Manganese, Iron , Nickel, Cobalt and Copper ... The chief result is that ... the result for any metal (is) quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of.

Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students never wonder when they will use this information in their "real life". Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve protecting the City from all threat while wearing spandex. As a law-abiding citizen, this notion fills me with a great sense of security, knowing as I do how many of my scientist colleagues could charitably be termed "mad".

It is possible for you to realise your dream as a scientist, you must be a passionate learner and curious enough to seek this wonderful career path.

Isn’t that what it means to be a scientist? To push the boundaries of the unknown? To bravely, actively explore the enormity of our universe ?

It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.

It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it.

It was disabling sickness in my forties that turned me into a leading scientist as I went on a voyage of discoveries to treat it.

I wanted to use science in a way that would have direct humanitarian consequences in interhuman relationships. And now even if I die, my works will keep on creating lion-hearted humanitarian torch-bearers of progress, for ages to come.

It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement— all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual... The greatest scientific deed of her life—proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them—owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed.

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, nor did I have access to information like you do today via the internet. I had to learn everything the hard way. And I had to become a scientist the old-fashioned way, which is, not through academia, but through trial and error. And my hardship opened up unforeseen gateways of perception in my mind. And through these gateways, today the whole world is able to see its inner self.

Love permeates all things and laws. Scientists should research it more.

My mission is to make the external God of human society obsolete in front of humanity’s internal Godliness.

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

Never abuse a scientist.

Never buy a home from a mad scientist.

Never question the conviction of a scientist, based on mere scriptures.

Right? I don’t know why I did it. Temporary insanity, maybe. Did you ever do something that makes absolutely no sense, but you couldn’t help yourself?

Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.

Science works through replication, rectification and modification.

She looked to Pippa. "Have I made it difficult for you?" Pippa hedged. "Not at all. Castleton sent news to Father just last week that he was planning to court me in earnest, and it's not as though I'm the most ordinary of debutantes." It was an understatement. Pippa was something of a bluestocking, very focused on the sciences and fascinated by the insides of living things, from plants to people. She'd once stolen a goose from the kitchens and dissected it in her bedchamber.

I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.

[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz] The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.

On tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu. Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.

Professor [John] Tyndall once said the finest inspiration he ever received was from an old man who could scarcely read. This man acted as his servant. Each morning the old man would knock on the door of the scientist and call, 'Arise, Sir: it is near seven o'clock and you have great work to do today.

So a scientist and an engineer are tossed into separate rooms, stocked with tools and parts, and told that they aren't allowed out until they've produced a working prototype for a radio receiver. After two days, the scientist has covered the walls in scribbling and looks like a mad man, raving about how not only is it impossible to build a receiver with the parts given but that he's proven that radio is theoretically impossible anyway. When they check on the engineer, they find that he'd built the receiver in less than a day, fashioned a crude speaker and antenna, and had found a radio broadcast he liked and hadn't bothered to tell them he'd finished.

Sophistication is not science people, simplicity is.

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.

The biggest thing that Stephen Hawking taught me is that an extremely sickly and sedentary person can live to the ripe old age of seventy six.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.

Sunset? Lupakan. Karena matahari tak pernah tenggelam. Bumi saja yang sedang berputar.

The mad scientist has gone crazy for a reason, and that reason typically lies in biologically toxic environmental exposures.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

There is an inexplicable sense of relief in being proven wrong, which perhaps can only be realized by either a scientist or a philosopher.

There is an overflowing grace, for every great work.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

The world is most consistent with purposeful creation.

This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous, even though he has no talent for chemistry. {Comment on German scientist Eduard Buchner who later ironically won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery}

This man [Alexander von Humboldt] is as knowledgeable as a whole academy.

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound... {His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}

Vulnerable, like all men, to the temptations of arrogance, of which intellectual pride is the worst, he [the scientist] must nevertheless remain sincere and modest, if only because his studies constantly bring home to him that, compared with the gigantic aims of science, his own contribution, no matter how important, is only a drop in the ocean of truth.