Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer
Session 82, Page 314
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 2
“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
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Ernest Rutherford16
New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist 1871–1937Related quotes
“The next revolution in scientific discovery will depend on scientific interdependence.”
Robert J. Birgeneau (1942) Canadian physicist
A modern public university, Nature Materials 6, 465 - 467 (01 Jul 2007), doi: 10.1038/nmat1935, Commentary.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.
p.5.
“Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist
"The Godfather of Disaster", p. 379
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
“I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident.”
Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher
Quoted in Sally Helgeson, "Every Day", Bookletter, Vol. 3, No. 8 (6 December 1976), p. 8
Context: I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph. D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do.
“The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology.”
Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician
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.”
Charles J. Pedersen (1904–1989) American organic chemist
in his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1987/pedersen-lecture.html, December 8, 1987.
Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time
Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.