Some Quotes To Warm Us Up

“That is the essence of science:  Ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”  Jacob Bronowski

“In mathematics you don’t understand things.  You just get used to them.”  John Von Neumann

“Americans are finally realizing that once you lose land, you can’t get it back.”  Christine Todd Whitman

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”  Neils Bohr

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”  Wernher Von Braun

“Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.”  Ezra Pound

“Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”  Bertrand Russell

“Stars are like animals in the wild.  We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.”  Heinz R. Pagels

“We hope to explain the whole universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on a T-shirt.”  Leon Lederman

“Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.”  Henri Poincare’

“Technology is a queer thing.  It brings you great gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other.”  C.P. Snow

“It is the theory that decides what we can observe.”  Albert Einstein

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”  Marston Bates

“When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all of the works of some great writer had perished.”  Theodore Roosevelt

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”  Michael Faraday

“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”  T.H. Huxley

“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.”  Arthur C. Clarke

“How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”  Arthur C. Clarke

“All problems are finally scientific problems.”  George Bernard Shaw

“In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”  Carl Sagan

“I see no reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.”  Charles Darwin

“A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.”  George Wald

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”  Democritus

“A scientist can discover a new star, but he cannot make one.  He would have to ask an engineer to do that.”  Gordon L. Glegg

“Physics, beware of metaphysics.”  Isaac Newton

“Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.”  Baruch Spinoza

“It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.”  Richard Feynman

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”  Adam Smith

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” 

Alfred North Whitehead