Eugene Wigner Quotes

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.

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

I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.

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.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.

But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.

Looking back on my 50-year eclectic journey in research, I am grateful that it has gone as well as it has, although still not clever enough to open the black box of enzyme structure.

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.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

Science is not addressed to poets.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow.

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.

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

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.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

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.

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

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it.

… after some hundreds of years of experience we think that we have learned … how to teach what is known. But now with the undeniable upsurge of scientific research, we cannot continue to rely on the mere fact that we have learned how to teach what is known. We must learn to teach the best attitude to what is not yet known.

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