Source: The World As I See It
“Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”
Last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Vol. 30, No. 26 (19 December 1966)
“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
“Cam Neely! Is he a beauty? Fifty goals in 49 games.”
In the "Slapshots" segment of the <i>Rock'Em Sock'Em Six</i> hockey highlights video.
“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
1930s, My Credo (1932)
Context: The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.
In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.
“Benjamin Franklin performed a beautiful experiment using surfactants”
"Soft Matter" Nobel lecture (9 December 1991) - full text in PDF format http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1991/gennes-lecture.html
Context: Benjamin Franklin performed a beautiful experiment using surfactants; on a pond at Clapham Common, he poured a small amount of oleic acid, a natural surfactant which tends to form a dense film at the water-air interface. He measured the volume required to cover all the pond. Knowing the area, he then knew the height of the film, something like three nanometers in our current units. This was to my knowledge the first measurement of the size of molecules. In our days, when we are spoilt with exceedingly complex toys, such as nuclear reactors or synchrotron sources, I particularly like to describe experiments of this Franklin style to my students.
Surfactants allow us to protect a water surface, and to generate these beautiful soap bubbles, which are the delight of our children.
“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
