"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr# "The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Bohr# "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." - Niels Bohr to a young physicist# "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison# "....I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison# "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Thomas Edison# "We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything." - Thomas Edison# "Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings, admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science." - Albert Einstein# "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." - Albert Einstein# "Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes, and feel with their own hearts." - Albert Einstein# "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." - Albert Einstein# "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein# "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein# "The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure." - Albert Einstein# "We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented." - Albert Einstein, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, September 1948# "Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein# "Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind union of the two will preserve an independent reality." - Albert Einstein# "The important thing is never to stop questioning." - Albert Einstein# "But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed." - Albert Einstein# "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity." - Albert Einstein# "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein# "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious." - Albert Einstein# "Who can imagine Moses, Jesus, or Ghandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?" - Albert Einstein# "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. This little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to rack and ruin without fail." - Albert Einstein# "The most beautiful thing to experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein# "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punshiment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein# "The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth." - Albert Einstein# "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein# "He who marches joyfully in rank and file has already earned my contempt. A large brain has been wasted on this individual, since for him, a spinal cord would suffice." - Albert Einstein# "If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Albert Einstein# "The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency." - Albert Einstein# "Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else--unless it is an enemy." - Albert Einstein# "Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." - Albert Einstein# "When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt." - Richard Feynman# "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman# "From a long view of the history of mankind -- seen from, say, ten thousand years from now -- there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provinciald insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade." - Richard P. Feynman# "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." - Richard Feynman# "There was a sociologist who had written a paper for all of us to read... I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it... Finally, I said to myself, 'I'm gonna stop and read one sentence slowly'... So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully... 'The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.' I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? 'People read.'" - Richard P. Feynman# "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei# "In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." - Galileo Galilei# "But where the senses fail us, reason must step in." - Galileo Galilei# "One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure." - Lord Kelvin# "[The vector] has never been of the slightest use to any creature." - Lord Kelvin# "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.# "Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man." - J. Robert Oppenheimer, speaking of Albert Einstein# "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement, can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." - J. Robert Oppenheimer# "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." - J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting "The Bhagavad Gita", Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1945# "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion." - Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address# "All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." - Carl Sagan# "It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese." - Carl Sagan# "Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense." - Carl Sagan# "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan# "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." - Carl Sagan# "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos# "A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." - Carl Sagan, "Contact"# "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan# "It has been determined that research causes cancer in rats." - Unknown# "Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division." - Unknown# "Theoretical physicist---a physicist whose existence is postulated, to make the numbers balance, but who is never actually observed in the laboratory." - Unknown# "If 99% is good enough, then gravity will not work for 14 mins every day. " - Unknown# "Chemistry is Physics without thought; Math is Physics without purpose." - Unknown# One of my favorite scientific quotes is from James Watson. Dr. Watson explains how to become a good scientist: "You've got to try and be with people who are brighter than yourself, you've got to be prepared sometimes to do things that people say you are not qualified to do, and since you know you are going to get in trouble, you ought to have someone to save you after you are in deep sh*t, so you better always have someone who believes in you." "Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein "The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before." Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1919) "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." Karl Popper (1957) "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." Martin Luther King (1965) "Science has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness." Aldous Huxley (1964) "Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification." Karl Popper (1982) "Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books." Francis Bacon (1610) "The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." T.H. Huxley (1894)