Top Ten Quirky Quotations About Science

The Top Ten

1 It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was. (Stephen Leacock, from The Boy I Left Behind Me)

Of course this had to be first.

2 It was absolutely marvelous working for Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought all questions were stupid. (Victor Weisskopf)

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

So true. That's the power of Mathematics and equations used in Physics. Derivations lead to results.

4 Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing. (Wernher von Braun)

Don't we all, Wernher?

5 Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. (Stephen Hawking, from A Brief History of Time)

He said in the book he tried not to scare anyone with Einstein's famous equation. That one's completely docile when compared with others.

6 Sir Humphrey Davy abominated gravy. He lived in the odium of having discovered sodium. (Edmund Clerihew Bentley)

7 'Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down; that's not my department', says Wernher von Braun. (Tom Lehrer)

8 If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is impossible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong. (Arthur C. Clarke)

9 The Microbe is so very small you cannot make him out at all. But many sanguine people hope to see him through a microscope. (Hilaire Belloc)

10 Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt. (Lev Landau)

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