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

[zoki85]

"I've never made a mistake, I've only learned from experience."

-T.A.Edison​

 

[Auto-Didact]

Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: 'I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.'
- Sir Michael Atiyah

 

[Auto-Didact]

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork. You want to find out what the facts are, and what you do is in that respect similar to what a laboratory technician does.
- Paul Halmos

 

[Demystifier]

All non-ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics are alike; each ontological interpretation is ontological in its own way.
- Hrvoje Nikolić (paraphrasing Tolstoy)

 

[atyy]

All non-ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics are alike; each ontological interpretation is ontological in its own way.
- Hrvoje Nikolić (paraphrasing Tolstoy)

Ontological interpretations are unhappy.

 

[kith]

Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: 'I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.'
- Sir Michael Atiyah

Nice quote! Here are some quotes from Paul Lockhart on a similar theme.

On why the Greeks didn't discover modern math:
"The curious thing is why history went the way it did, and why the modern approach has been so much more successful. The classical Greek geometers were every bit as brilliant and resourceful as their seventeenth-century counterparts (if not more so). It is certainly not a question of mathematical talent. There are plenty of reasons why the Greeks preferred direct geometric reasoning, aesthetic taste, of course, being one of them. In fact, this prejudice was taken to such an extreme that numbers themselves tended to be viewed geometrically (as lengths of sticks), and numerical operations were thought of as geometrical transformations (e.g. multiplication as scaling). This severely hampered their understanding."

On the tension between working with classical-geometry-based and number-based methods:
"There is no question that as visual animals we prefer a picture to a string of alchemical symbols. I, for one, want to feel connected to my problem on a visceral, tactile level. It helps me understand the relevant issues when I can imagine running my hand over a surface or wiggling part of an object and picturing in my mind's eye what happens. But I know that when push comes to shove, the truth is in the details, and the details are in the number pattern.
Of course, any analytic argument could be painstakingly translated into purely geometric terms, and in fact, this is the way many seventeenth-century mathematicians worked; even then there was still a great deal of prejudice in favor of geometric reasoning. This tends, however, to produce very contorted and artificial explanations in place of concise, almost too-simple-to-believe analytic arguments."

On math and modernism:
"I suppose what I'm really talking about here is modernism. The exact same issues - abstraction, the study of pattern for its own sake, and (sadly) the alienation of the layperson - are all present in modern art, music and literature. I would even venture to say that we mathematicians have gone the furthest in this direction , for the simple reason that there is nothing whatever to stop us. Untethered from the constraints of physical reality, we can push much further in the direction of simple beauty. Mathematics is the only true abstract art."

His personal conclusion:
"Maybe it all comes down to this. There are lots of beautiful patterns out there. Some, such as a triangle taking up half its box, can be easily seen and felt; others, like d(x^3) = 3x^2 dx, are not so immediately available to our visual imagination. So be it; I myself want to be open to all forms of beauty. For me, that's what being a mathematician is all about."
(all from chapter 25 of Part Two of his book Measurement)

 

[jack action]

«Skepticism is dangerous. That's exactly its function, in my view. It is the business of skepticism to be dangerous. And that's why there is a great reluctance to teach it in the schools. That's why you don't find a general fluency in skepticism in the media. On the other hand, how will we negotiate a very perilous future if we don't have the elementary intellectual tools to ask searching questions of those nominally in charge, especially in a democracy?

[...]

I want to say a little more about the burden of skepticism. You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as dearly as you do. [...]

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you're in deep trouble.»

THE BURDEN OF SKEPTICISM by Carl Sagan first published in Skeptical Inquirer, vol.12, Fall 1987

 

[Auto-Didact]

Thus the combination Hamiltonian formalism, complex structure and projective structure is sufficient to deduce the Schr¨odinger dynamics, for all possible phase space dimensions. Unlike the usual axiomatization of QM, Hilbert space is now a consequence.
- K.R.W. Jones

 

[Demystifier]

Thus the combination Hamiltonian formalism, complex structure and projective structure is sufficient to deduce the Schr¨odinger dynamics, for all possible phase space dimensions. Unlike the usual axiomatization of QM, Hilbert space is now a consequence.
- K.R.W. Jones

Can you give the reference? I would like to see the technical details.

 

[DanielMB]

Can you give the reference? I would like to see the technical details.

Just google "The Schrödinger equation from three postulates, Jones"

 

[Demystifier]

Just google "The Schrödinger equation from three postulates, Jones"

It seems that the paper has been submitted to MPLA, but has never been published in a journal.

 

[DanielMB]

Y

It seems that the paper has been submitted to MPLA, but has never been published in a journal.

You are right, it could be traced to the proceedings of a 1994 conference in Adelaide, Australia, but I couldn't find its publication in a journal

 

[Demystifier]

You are right, it could be traced to the proceedings of a 1994 conference in Adelaide, Australia, but I couldn't find its publication in a journal

But some of those results he published as a part of another paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003491684710700?via=ihub

 

[Auto-Didact]

But some of those results he published as a part of another paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003491684710700?via=ihub

Here is Jones' list of publications:
http://krwjones.com/wordpress/publications/

'The Schrodinger Equation from Three Postulates' indeed seems to have been solely published in the proceedings of that conference: https://doi.org/10.1142/9789814532228

In any case, I would say his most important work (in physics) is probably: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9507001

 

[Auto-Didact]

"All linear equations describing the evolution of physical systems are known to be approximations to some nonlinear theories, with only one notable exception of the Schrodinger equation."
- I. Bialynicki-Birula

 

[Frigus]

So is biological taxonomy.

Can you please explain it.
I think it is because every organism is interrelated.

 

[BillTre]

Can you please explain it.
I think it is because every organism is interrelated.

There used to be few named species and the naming was not very organized (or systematized).
Now there are more species and rules for how they get named. Generally, now names are to reflect the best understanding of the evolutionary relationships among the species.
Modern names are usually made of a genus name (can be shared with other species in the same genus) and a species name (which can also be used for other species in other genera (plural genus).

Because of the rules now used, combined with new techniques for determining relationships and an immense amount of new molecular data being used, the names get changed frequently.
As a result, some names have been used for more than one species. The older names remain in the literature and have to be reinterpreted.

The genus name is shared among multiple species due to their being related.

 

[Frigus]

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-- Rutherford

Plot twist:- he got Nobel prize in chemistry.

 

[melissaa]

Great quotes.
This one is my favorite though:

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
(Albert Einstein)

 

[BillTre]

Not really a quote, but a pretty good summary of some of the motivating factors of scientists doing science.
Comment made in response to the idea of most scientists are suppressing anti-global warming science.

 

[BillTre]

Now for a more traditional quote.

A famous quote from 1973 is:
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Except in the Light of Evolution"
by Theodosius Dobzhansky
This refers to the importance of evolution in understanding/explaining the functions and diversity of biological systems.

An interesting, more recent (2018) variant is:
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Except in the Light of Information"
by Bernd-Olaf Küppers
This refers to the importance of information in understanding/explaining biological/molecular functions.

 

[Auto-Didact]

"In Hilbert space no one can hear you scream."
- Yakir Aharonov

 

[Duplex]

Asteroids have us in their sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

[Auto-Didact]

Thus quantum mechanics occupies a very unusual place among physical theories: it contains classical mechanics as a limiting case, yet at the same time it requires this limiting case for its own formulation.
- Landau & Lifshitz

 

[atyy]

All non-ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics are alike; each ontological interpretation is ontological in its own way.
- Hrvoje Nikolić (paraphrasing Tolstoy)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04008
Anna Karenina and The Two Envelopes Problem
R. D. Gill

 

[Vanadium 50]

From the same paper:

TEP-1 does not deserve to be called a paradox (and certainly not an unresolved paradox, as many writers in philosophy still insist on claiming): it is merely an example of a screwed-up probability calculation

.

 

[DanielMB]

"...I won't insist on any formal definition of 'cause' and will even admit that I have never seen anything in the life sciences that resembles the 'necessary and sufficient' conditions for causation that are so beloved of logicians..." Bill Shipley (Cause and Correlation in Biology, Cambridge, Second Edition)

 

[Auto-Didact]

The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it.
- Jacques Hadamard

 

[Auto-Didact]

The really amazing thing is if you try doing this process again you get a sixteen dimensional algebra, but it's not a normed division algebra anymore; the machine breaks after four uses and there is no money back guarantee.
- John Baez

 

[Auto-Didact]

The best mathematics uses the whole mind, embraces human sensibility, and is not at all limited to the small portion of our brains that calculates and manipulates symbols. Through pursuing beauty we find truth, and where we find truth we discover incredible beauty.
– William Thurston