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

[George Jones]

Equations may be universal, but the way we understand them and combine them with other results is very personal.
Christophe Grojean

 

[George Jones]

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

 

[Demystifier]

Talking about physical laws without talking about ontology is like talking about legal laws without talking about humans. A professional can do it to make the laws more efficient, but then one can miss what the laws are really about.
- Hrvoje Nikolić

 

[AlexCaledin]

I'll tell you a story. When I was thirteen I met a girl, Arlene. Arlene was my first girlfriend. We went together for many years, at first not so seriously, then more seriously. We fell in love. When I was nineteen we got engaged, and when I was twenty-six we got married. I loved her very deeply. We grew up together. I changed her by imparting to her my point of view, my rationality. She changed me. She helped me a lot. She taught me that one has to be irrational sometimes. That doesn't mean stupid, it just means that there are occasions, situations, you should think about, and others you shouldn't.
...
My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you’re happy, don’t. Why spoil it?
...
But with Arlene I was really happy for a while. So I have had it all. After Arlene, the rest of my life didn't have to be so good, you see, because I had already had it all.

Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life
page 158...160

 

[Auto-Didact]

Doing things crazy you have to get used to the idea that crazy might be alright; crazy is alright if it works. - Sir Roger Penrose

 

[Dr Transport]

Feynman giving a lecture:

"Gravity is a weak force" (as a light fixture crashes to the ground) "but it is not negligible..."

 

[dwunder]

Nothing wrong with quoting yourself. Quotes aren't good because of who said them, despite what people may think. The message is the same regardless if Albert Einstein said it or Justin Bieber.

If a credible source is no longer required for pontification, have a seat. I have much to offer. :-D

 

[Auto-Didact]

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

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomenon. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
- John von Neumann

 

[AlexCaledin]

 

[Casmo]

Really awesome quotes!

 

[AlexCaledin]

One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!"
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here, There's no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?"--and I got scared.
I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
page 204

 

[Auto-Didact]

In other words, the axioms of geometry (I do not speak of those of arithmetic) are only definitions in disguise. What, then, are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian co-ordinates are true and polar co-ordinates false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.
- Henri Poincaré

 

[Auto-Didact]

I would like to interrupt here to make a remark. The fact that electrodynamics can be written in so many ways - the differential equations of Maxwell, various minimum principles with fields, minimum principles without fields, all different kinds of ways, was something I knew, but I have never understood. It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. An example of that is the Schrödinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why this is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. A thing like the inverse square law is just right to be represented by the solution of Poisson's equation, which, therefore, is a very different way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but maybe that is a way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.
- Richard Feynman

 

[OmCheeto]

"Why is there no Flat Mars Society!?"
---Elon Musk

 

[Auto-Didact]

Mandelbrot, like Prime Minister Churchill before him, promises us not utopia but blood, sweat, toil and tears. If he is right, almost all of our statistical tools are obsolete—least squares, spectral analysis, workable maximum-likelihood solutions, all our established sample theory, closed distributions. Almost without exception, past econometric work is meaningless.
- Paul Cootner

 

[AlexCaledin]

 

[Tom.G]

I often feel that way about the Internet. I think, "show me some interesting fact, damn it, that I have no inkling of!" No response.

That's called Specialization, edit: Echo Chamber, or House-of-Mirrors, /edit: tell me something I already know about. The antidote is called a book, you do not need to know something to find something interesting.

(That would also be the reason Newspapers exist.)

 

[Auto-Didact]

What I have just outlined is what I call a ‘physicist’s history of physics’, which is never correct… a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicist tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and it is not necessarily related to actual historical development, which I do not really know!
- Richard Feynman

 

[AlexCaledin]

 

[Auto-Didact]

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.
- Einstein

 

[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.