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

[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

 

[Auto-Didact]

As Archimedes says, “It is easier to supply the proof when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions than it is to find it without any previous knowledge.” In other words, by noodling around, playing with the Method, he gets a feel for the territory. And that guides him to a watertight proof.
This is such an honest account of what it’s like to do creative mathematics. Mathematicians don’t come up with the proofs first. First comes intuition. Rigor comes later. This essential role of intuition and imagination is often left out of high-school geometry courses, but it is essential to all creative mathematics.
- Steven Strogatz

 

[BillTre]

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
in the essay: Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
by Theodosius Dabzhansky

An essay written to encourage the teaching of biological evolution in schools (vs. creationism).
Dobzhansky had religious beliefs, but was very important in producing the modern synthesis, which brought together:

• evolutionary thought (natural selection for particular nitches)
• genetics (including mutations; not understood in Darwin's time;
  Mendel was only rediscovered in 1900 (but first published in 1866, a few years after the Origin of Species!))
• population genetics (newly created)
• a better understanding of the Earth's geological and evolutionary history.

More modern (post modern synthesis) additions to evolutionary thought might include:

• an understanding of the importance of DNA (and molecular/cellular biology) in the evolutionary process (starts 1953)
• immense amounts of evolutionary data in DNA sequences
• understanding random genetic drift's effects on evolution
• generative processes: considering developmental processes and emergent (higher order) phenomena (that arise in the proper, larger scale environment) effects on the generation of biological structure

 

[Auto-Didact]

One should mention that a quantization of the gravitational field, which appears to be necessary for physical reasons, may be carried out without any new difficulties by means of a formalism wholly analogous to that applied here.
- Heisenberg and Pauli (1929, p. 3)

 

[Duplex]

"Einstein was a giant, his head was in the clouds while his feet were firmly on the ground. The rest of us must pick one."
- Richard Feynman

 

[Auto-Didact]

Operationalism is not sidestepping the need for philosophical analysis, but is itself just bad philosophy!
- Michael Redhead

 

[A M]

A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.

 

[A M]

-A.Einstein (as written in the title!)

 

[Klystron]

"Stupidity got us here. Why can't it get us out?"

--English translation of Latin vulgate attributed to Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay trapped inside the walls of Ascalon. Probably apocryphal but Bernard was well educated.

...a setback for Ascalon occurred in August when the besieged tried to burn down one of the crusader siege towers; the wind pushed the fire back against their own walls, causing a large section to collapse. According to William of Tyre, knights of the Order rushed through the breach without Baldwin's knowledge where Bernard de Tremelay and about forty of his Templars were killed by the larger Egyptian garrison. Their bodies were displayed on the ramparts and their heads were sent to the caliph in Cairo.

 

[PGaccount]

"raffiniert ist der hergott, aber boshaft ist er nicht" - A. Einstein.

 

[PGaccount]

"It was not the love of something or someone, the image and the symbol, the word and the pictures. It wasn't an emotion that fades and is cruel; the symbol, the word can be substituted but not the thing."

 

[Auto-Didact]

Where in the Schrödinger equation do you put the joy of being alive?
- Eugene Wigner

 

[Vanadium 50]

"How can one smile when one is thinking of the anomalous Zeeman effect?" - W. Pauli

 

[Vanadium 50]

"An inordinate fondness for beetles" - JBS Haldane.

 

[strangerep]

"How can one smile when one is thinking of the anomalous Zeeman effect?" - W. Pauli

"How can one smile when one is (trying to) work with W. Pauli?" - E. Stuckelberg.

 

[Auto-Didact]

If you make axioms, rather
than definitions and theorems, about the ‘measurement’ of anything else, then
you commit redundancy and risk inconsistency.
- John Bell 1982