What Do These Famous Quotes Reveal About the Minds of Great Scientists?

[Auto-Didact]

Perhaps too we shall have to construct an entirely new mechanics, which we can only just get a glimpse of, where, the inertia increasing with the velocity, the velocity of light would be a limit beyond which it would be impossible to go. The ordinary, simpler mechanics would remain a first approximation since it would be valid for velocities that are not too great, so that the old dynamics would be found in the new. We should have no reason to regret that we believed in the older principles, and indeed since the velocities that are too great for the old formulas will always be exceptional, the safest thing to do in practice would be to act as though we continued to believe in them. They are so useful that a place should be saved for them. To wish to banish them altogether would be to deprive oneself of a valuable weapon. I hasten to say, in closing, that we are not yet at that pass, and that nothing proves as yet that they will not come out of the fray victorious and intact.
- Henri Poincaré

 

[hyunxu]

MY favourite quote!

 

[hyunxu]

My favourite scientist said this

 

[phyzguy]

"The rotating armatures of every generator and every motor in this age of electricity are steadily proclaiming the truth of the relativity theory to all who have ears to hear,"

Leigh Page, 1941

 

[George Jones]

"As theorists sometimes do, I fell in love with this idea. But as often happens with love affairs, at first I was rather confused about about its implications."

Stephen Weinberg (on symmetry breaking)

 

[Auto-Didact]

I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.
- Richard Feynman (on string theory)

 

[AlexCaledin]

From the Feynman Lectures

...we get immediately into the most complicated possible situation if we are to do it correctly and in detail. We are always in the difficulty that we can either treat something in a logically rigorous but quite abstract way, or we can do something which is not at all rigorous but which gives us some idea of a real situation—postponing until later a more careful treatment. ... As we go along, the precision of the description will increase, so don’t get nervous that we seem to be picking things out of the air. It is, of course, all out of the air—the air of experiment and of the imagination of people.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_07.html

 

[Auto-Didact]

All told, my methods of investigation are those of a theoretical and computational physicist. As a matter of fact, this has been the case in every substantive field in which I worked. But there are significant wrinkles. I do not propose to pursue the adaptation to economics of an existing theory of equilibrium and of "mild" fluctuations. To the contrary, my tools were not to reach physics proper until later, as shall be told in this Preface. Therefore, my forty-five years in science can be viewed as being unified in giving a broader scope to the spirit of physics.
- Benoit B. Mandelbrot

 

[AlexCaledin]

 

[diogenesNY]

"Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think!"

--Murray Gell-Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Manncourtesy of diogenesNY

 

[Asymptotic]

“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write the influence off as a mistake.” --- Yakir Aharonov

 

[OmCheeto]

"Creativity is combining facts no one else has connected before."

--- Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard​

-------

My caveat; "Just make sure 2 + 2 ≠ 5"

 

[Auto-Didact]

‘Passer de la mécanique de Newton à celle d’Einstein doit être un peu, pour le mathématicien, comme de passer du bon vieux dialecte provençal à l’argot parisien dernier cri. Par contre, passer à la mécanique quantique, j’imagine, c’est passer du français au chinois.’ (Grothendieck, 1986, p. 61)

Translation: ‘Switching from Newton’s mechanics to Einstein’s, for a mathematician, must to some extent be like switching from a good old provincial dialect to the latest Parisian slang. In contrast, switching to quantum mechanics, I imagine, is like switching from French to Chinese.’

 

[AlexCaledin]

- about the "Process time" rather than "Einstein time".

 

[gmax137]

75% of quotations on the internet are mis-attributed

 

[kith]

"If you understand a thing one way you have poked it with a poker. But if you understand it in two different ways you have gripped it with pliers." L. C. Epstein

 

[Auto-Didact]

"Interactions of matter and fields are generally nonlinear, so that nonlinear problems play a central role in physics. In fact because nonlinearity is so basic to nature, it is possible that even a theory as fundamentally linear as quantum theory may ultimately have to be replaced by a nonlinear one." - Werner Heisenberg

 

[Duplex]

Arthur C. Clarke's three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

[Auto-Didact]

"Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory." - Asher Peres

 

[Bayode1]

scientific research is more honestly reported as a tangle of deduction, induction, and guesswork
Steven Weinberg

 

[Auto-Didact]

"Everyone is sure [that errors are normally distributed]", Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians believe that it is an experimentally determined fact.
- Henri Poincaré (translation from French)

 

[Auto-Didact]

We have here a very important lesson. Nonlinear equations, though local in appearance, may nevertheless conceal non-local effects.
- Yakir Aharonov

 

[Auto-Didact]

Long may Louis de Broglie continue to inspire those who suspect that what is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.
- John Bell

 

[Auto-Didact]

In the broad light of day mathematicians check their equations and their proofs,
leaving no stone unturned in their search for rigour. But, at night, under the full moon, they dream, they float among the stars and wonder at the mystery of the heavens: they are inspired. Without dreams there is no art, no mathematics, no life.
— Sir Michael Atiyah (1929 - 2019)

 

[DanielMB]

A little bit of humour ...

Fritz Zwicky (astronomer) used to call other astronomers at the Mount Wilson observatory "Spherical bastards". Why spherical? Because they were bastards, when looked at from any side

 

[DanielMB]

Fritz Zwicky were once inviting some graduate students for dinner. As the group was ringing the door bell, Zwicki's wife Dorothea opened and called into the house without intending to joke: "Fritz, the bastards are here!".

 

[Auto-Didact]

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."
- Alan Kay (computer scientist)

 

[marcusl]

One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.

E. T. Jaynes

— Probability Theory as Logic

 

[Demystifier]

Physicists are too smart to be left dealing with physics only.
- Hrvoje Nikolić

 

[DrTherapist]

"However difficult life may seem, there's always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there's hope."
- Stephen Hawking.

 

[romsofia]

"No one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."
John Von Neumann

 

[Auto-Didact]

In the end we are driven to search for what we hope will turn out to be the correct ontology of the world. After all, it is the desire to understand what reality is like that burns deepest in the soul of any true physicist. - Lucien Hardy

 

[Lord Jestocost]

But it did not turn out that way. To what appeared to be the simplest questions, we will tend to give either no answer or an answer which will at first sight be reminiscent more of a strange catechism than of the straightforward affirmatives of physical science. If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say "no"; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say "no"; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say "no"; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say "no." The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of a man's self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in “Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community”

 

[Auto-Didact]

Natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it. They cannot, however, make any headway without thought, and for thought they need thought determinations. But they take these categories unreflectingly from the common consciousness of so-called educated persons, which is dominated by the relics of long obsolete philosophies, or from the little bit of philosophy compulsorily listened to at the university (which is not only fragmentary, but also a medley of views of people belonging to the most varied and usually the worst schools), or from uncritical and unsystematic reading of philosophical writings of all kinds. Hence they are no less in bondage to philosophy, but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy, and those who abuse philosophy most are slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophers.
- Friedrich Engels

 

[Auto-Didact]

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”.
- Richard Feynman