IDEA-ISAAC
APS News Online April 1999 Edition

Copyright © 1999 by The American Physical Society.
The APS encourages the redistribution of the materials included in this newsletter provided that attribution to the source is noted and the materials are not truncated or changed.
Cited here by IDEA according to the above encouragement.

Quoteworthy Science



"X rays. Their moral is this: that a right way of looking at things will see through almost anything."
- Samuel Butler, British writer (1835-1902)

"There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down error instead of establishing the truth."
- Marie Curie, Polish chemist/physicist

"For the rest of my life, I will reflect on what light is."
- Albert Einstein, German-American physicist. (C. 1917)

"One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
- Albert Einstein

"[The wave-particle view of physics is like a struggle] between a tiger and a shark: each is supreme in his own element but helpless in that of the other."
-J.J. Thomson, British physicist (1925)

"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (1945)*

"In some sort of crude sense... the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer (1947)

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
- Werner Karl Heisenberg, German physicist (1958)

"All that glisters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons."
- John Desmond Bernal, British X-ray crystallographer and author (1960)

"[The wave-particle duality] is absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way.... [It] has in it the heart of quantum mechanics... it contains the only mystery."
- Richard Feynman, American physicist (1966, 1985)

"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."
- Homer Adkins (1984)


* In Letters column of APS News, June 1999, Wayne Saslow at Texas A&M University pointed out that this quote is actually a quote by Oppenheimer from an Indian source, the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." See also "Brighter than a Thousand Suns" by Robert Jungk (Engl. tr. James Cleugh, Penguin, 1960) (this note written by T. T. on 6 Aug 1999, the commemorative day of atomic bomb explosion upon Hiroshima)

Top of Page  |  Home 1 (English)  |  Home 2 (English)  |  Home 1 (Japanese)

inserted by FC2 system