Pieter Zeeman Quotes

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

Campaigns are weird animals and innately bring out bizarre road stories.

I guess that's just the life of an inventor: what people do with your ideas takes you totally by surprise.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.

All of my books tend to be about things going on in labs that you wouldn't really expect.

I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.

Synergy and serendipity often play a big part in medical and scientific advances.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.

It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.

Every single thing you do, you don't really have expectations.

It's a new situation. Of course, you have always the goal for years to go there and to reach the top, but then if you are there, you actually don't know what to expect.

The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?

When [my father] asked me to help him, I really didn't suspect the consequences.

Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.

I've been in plenty of situations where I thought the film would turn out one way or my performance would be looked at one way and it was an entirely different situation.

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.

We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.

What we look for does not come to pass; God finds a way for what none foresaw.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.