Ernest Rutherford Quotes

Physics is a hobby of mine, as much as a person of limited intelligence can understand physics.

I count myself fortunate to be able to contribute to this work; and the great interest which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has shown in my work and the recognition that it has paid to my past successes, convince me that I am not on the wrong track.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

The sequence of theorist, experimenter, and discovery has occasionally been compared to the sequence of farmer, pig, truffle. The farmer leads the pig to an area where there might be truffles. The pig searches diligently for the truffles. Finally, he locates one, and just as he is about to devour it, the farmer snatches it away.

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning.

An experiment disproving a prediction is discovery.

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.

That's the nice thing about doing research. Whatever you do is novel, so you always have this sense of novelty, even if you are only using a new gadget.

The first thing to make clear is that scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

I just wanted to be a scientist.

From an early age, I knew I would become a scientist. It may have been my brother Sam's doing. He interested me in the laws of falling bodies when I was ten and helped my father equip a basement chemistry lab for me when I was fifteen. I became skilled in the synthesis of selenium halides.

From my earliest days I had a passion for science.

We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

I'm a real amateur enthusiast for science.

At school, I was fanatical about being a scientist.

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

If I had a weak ego, and doubts about this, the first genome would not yet have been completed with US and UK government funding.

If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I've always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.