John Pople Quotes
On my return to Pittsburgh, I resolved to go back to the fundamental problems of electronic structure that I had contemplated abstractly many years earlier.
Pople, John A. "John Pople - Biographical." Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1998, edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, 1999.
This quotation illustrates a way in which science is frequently at odds with politics. Our politicians realize the importance of scientific research to our standard of living, economy, and quality of life. So they want to support research and development programs. However, budgeting and planning for these in terms of expected or desired results is virtually impossible. So scientific research, especially basic research is not susceptible to the usual planning and monitoring that is so common and effective in construction projects or other applications of science and technology. It is hard to predict when and which scientists will have the next critical idea. It is very difficult to hold scientists or administrators accountable for scientific research results because of this factor. See {624876}.
This is almost the universal belief of scientists—religious or not. The faith of religion, if extended to science, does not give the person the tools of logic, empiricism, and deduction that is so critical for the scientist. The cleric, in contrast, requires faith. Politicians split. There are many who have the outlook of the scientist. However, there are also political ideologues, who want faithful adherence to the doctrine, as the theological leaders does, and does not subject the doctrine to analytic scrutiny.
Sir John Anthony Pople KBE FRS was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.
