Physicist Quotes

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

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

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

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

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

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

The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that.

My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.

In the tail above the giant resonance, you can get not just one neutron emitted but two, three, four or five, and so there are a lot of things one can measure, looking at the competition with the emission of neutrons and protons and so on.

I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

I had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad, when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop, I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital.

Being appointed Elder Professor meant very much taking over the shop, in that the professor in those days controlled all the moneys.

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

My father was very much a handy person round the house, and I learnt a lot of carpentry from him.

We had an erector set, and I was an avid fan of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines.

These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.

Our family was very fond of the University of Iowa. We thought it was a good place to go.