Walther Bothe Quotes

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next.

It is crucial for scientists to be willing to be wrong; otherwise, you might not do the most important experiments, or you may ignore your most important findings.

I love to be a scientist. I've always enjoyed being curious.

I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems.

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Everybody, as soon as they do a good experiment, their first thought in this lab is, 'That can't be right. I must have screwed it up. What did I do wrong?' And that's the best kind of scientist because they're filled with this self-doubt. And if I'm going to be honest, that's who I am. And it's what drives me.

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

I have a tendency, more than most other physicists, to try to figure out everything all at once, before I publish. And even to try to figure out everything in my head, without pencil and paper.

One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.

The business of biomedical research is mostly about failure. Few projects we commission will ultimately result in success. But every study we do contributes to the body of knowledge that brings science and society closer to a solution.

I've always been fascinated by real scientists - Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and so many others - how they've come up with solutions to very complicated problems that nobody else can seem to figure out.

I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

I always looked at myself as a physicist learning new tricks by looking at nature.

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.

The beginnings of science have often the appearance of chance. A felicitous accident throws a certain natural fact under the notice of an inquiring and philosophic mind.

You don’t make progress in science by finding things that are right. You make progress by finding things that are wrong. You won’t win the Nobel Prize by showing Einstein was right. You win the prize by showing that he was wrong.

Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.

What I found was that I thoroughly enjoyed the plumbing of experiment.