Rainer Weiss Quotes

I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.

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

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'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

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

I like to look for patterns in science and life. It's what I do.

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.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

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

My students may have dexterity with the equations they're required to know, but they lack the capacity to apply their knowledge to real-life problems. This critical shortcoming appears in high school and possibly in elementary grades - long before college.

I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.

The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption.

And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born within us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat else.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

Science is not an intelligence test. Intuition is important, knowing what kind of questions to ask. The other thing is a passion for getting to the core of the problem.

A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course, it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.