Nassau William Senior Quotes

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

Sometimes I think that our laboratories are but little earthworks which men build about themselves, and whose puny tops too often conceal from view the Olympian heights; that we who work in these laboratories are but skilled artisans compared with the man who is able to observe and to draw accurate deductions from the world about him.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

The true man of science - will smell, taste, see, hear better than other men.

If you are a researcher, you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is.

In science, every question answered leads to 10 more. I love that science can never, ever be finished. From a young age, people think, 'Science is hard and boring.' We don't tell children, 'Yes, you have to learn these formulae and theorems, but then you go on to learn about nuclear reactions and stars.'

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

Most scientific problems are defined by the question of whether a graduate student can study it for his thesis.

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

In basic research, intellectual rigor and sentimental freedom necessarily alternate.

I'm a research queen.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.