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)