Browsing Topic Best Great Scientist Quotes

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it enough.

Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed. That was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science – in my opinion, this is just an opinion – that’s where science leads you.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

I don’t think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A, that there is no consensus, and, B, that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America’s most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking ‘plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself’.

Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair … I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking’s wheelchair. … The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein’s visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later. … They showed exquisite choice in their heroes. … Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings.

It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get Nobel Prizes.

The great scientist dares to differ from accepted ‘facts’ – think irrationally – let the artist do likewise.

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.

All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

[On Richard P. Feynman’s live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

They’re a lot of great scientists and their mission is to protect people. It’s the Environmental Protection Agency, but it’s really a people protection agency. And they’re out there trying to do their job and do the science.

The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.