Yehiam Prior Quotes

We have two boys, and one of our kids is much more interested in history and stories, so if you want him to do some calculations about lenses, you would start talking to him about Galileo... Then he would be into the lenses, but if you just start talking to him about lenses, he might not stay with you.

I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.

Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.

Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.

In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.

The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.

Ever since I was little, I've always had a few science experiments going on.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

Breakthroughs are by definition unpredicted events. Therefore predicting breakthroughs is a particularly difficult business.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

Cross pollination of fields, innovation in one stimulates revolutionary changes in another. All the instruments in a hospital which allow us observation of the human body without cutting you open were based on principles of physicists developed by physicists who had no interest in medicine. This is the way innovation moves from one field to another.

The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them..

Basic research, performed for curiosity today, will drive the innovations years from now. When qunatum mecahnics was curioisty-driven basic research 80 years ago, no none had any inkling that there would be prectical cosequences of it. However today much more than half of entire gross nationa product was and is dependent on quantum mechanics. Cell phones, computers, and all the things we enjory were innovations that could not have taken place without an understanding of quantum mechanics.

It is much harder to see under water than in air, as we land creatures do, so there are quite a few varied visual systems to be found in sea creatures.

I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times, I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success; at others, I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

Light is therefore color.