Mark Oliphant Quotes

Sometimes I have good ideas. I love that part of our job. It's a constant process of searching, of exploring stuff, and realizing things. You can be in the middle of the film and it's like, "Oh my God! I think we need to do this! Maybe in this scene she should shave her head!"

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

It is important to stop being critical and judging ideas as good or bad because I think if somebody doesn't have a lot of experience you worry their idea is going to be bad, it's not going to be good enough, if not going to be active enough and so you can start to think critically about people's suggestions or what they bring to it but once you get out of that and think whatever they come up with is the right thing right now and so I'm just going to build on it just makes everything so much easier and better.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

If you have an idea that's going to make a big difference to people's lives, and other people are not doing it, you know, just say "screw it," do it and get on with it, and give it a go.

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.

The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.

Sometimes you need to transport your idea to an empty landscape and then populate it with fantastic looking people.

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

Any leader who asks the right questions of the right people has the potential to discover and develop great ideas.

No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.

Research is one of the Nation's very greatest resources and the role of the Federal Government in supporting and stimulating it needs to reexamined.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.

You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

The day that you stop looking - because you're content God did it - I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.