“I realized that nature is filled with a limitless number of wonderful things which have causes and reasons like anything else but nonetheless cannot be forseen but must be discovered, for their subtlety and complexity transcends the present state of science.”
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: I realized that nature is filled with a limitless number of wonderful things which have causes and reasons like anything else but nonetheless cannot be forseen but must be discovered, for their subtlety and complexity transcends the present state of science. The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
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Robert B. Laughlin 14
American physicist 1950Related quotes
“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose”
Source: Man's Search for Meaning
English and Welsh (1955)
Si la coustume estoit de mettre les petites filles a l'escole, et que communement on les fist apprendre les sciences comme on fait aux filz, qu'elles apprendroient aussi parfaitement et entenderoient les subtilités de toutes les arz et sciences comme ils font.
Part I, ch. 27, p. 63.
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (c. 1405)
Source: The Book of the City of Ladies
Chapter XXVIII http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26640/26640-h/26640-h.htm#CHAPTER_XXVIII
The Humbugs of the World (1865)
Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 8: Western Civilisation
As quoted in The God Particle (1993) by Leon Lederman – ISBN 978–0–618–71168–0
Context: The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.