Nobel Laureate Quotes

Nobel Laureate Quote of the day

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

Now I know what the atom looks like.

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.

Reality is complicated. There is no justification for all of the hasty conclusions.

In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.

A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.

If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.

There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.

[My study of the universe] leaves little doubt that life has occurred on other planets. I doubt if the human race is the most intelligent form of life.

[Pure research] is worth every penny it costs.

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.

I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.

Light brings us the news of the Universe.

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy. ... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.

In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a “discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

I am an atheist.

The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way.

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

I’m now ‘Doctor’ to the patients and I have to cover my ignorance by waving my arms and looking grave.

Emil Fischer represents a symbol of Germany's greatness.

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hi

I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little.[Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]

Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.