
p. 166 https://books.google.com/books/about/More_and_Different.html?id=tU9yOac455kC&pg=PA166
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
A modern public university, Nature Materials 6, 465 - 467 (01 Jul 2007), doi: 10.1038/nmat1935, Commentary.
p. 166 https://books.google.com/books/about/More_and_Different.html?id=tU9yOac455kC&pg=PA166
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)
“The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology.”
Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 150.
“Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.”
in his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1987/pedersen-lecture.html, December 8, 1987.
“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”
As quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (1973) by G. J. Whitrow, p. 42
Variants:
If you can't explain your physics to a barmaid it is probably not very good physics.
As quoted in Journal of Advertising Research (March-April 1998)
A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.
As quoted in The Language of God (2006) by Francis Collins, p. 60
[Newcomb, Simon, Is the Airship Coming?, McClure's magazine, September 1901, 17, 5, 432–435, S. S. McClure, Limited, http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/library/Magazines/Airship_Coming.html]
‘Hypothesis and Imagination’ in The Art of the Soluble, 1967.
1960s
Einstein's special theory of relativity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on nature; Einstein's general theory of relativity, which reveals the curvature or non-Euclidean geometry of space and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those earlier astronomers who first contemplated the possibility that their existence lay on something which was not flat. These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come when Einstein's amazing revelations have likewise sunk into the commonplaces of educated thought.
The Theory of Relativity and its Influence on Scientific Thought (1922), p. 31-32
In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.
Nobel lecture (1973)