David Hilbert Quotes

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

I have emphasized experiments more than theory. Of course, we need some theory when thinking of soft matter.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

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

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.

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

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

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.

I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.

The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.

Fundamental science that may not achieve results must be supported at the state level.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

As Stephen's fame began to take off in a big way, and because he was so immersed in physics, it was becoming more and more difficult to communicate with him.

I always looked at myself as a physicist learning new tricks by looking at nature.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

But even technical work filled with formulas can be valuable and important. Einstein offered a lot of technical work on quantum physics, which mostly eludes me. I refer to his work, and I have studied it, but I am not a physicist. But look at Einstein's simple statement that the most important decision you ever will make is the decision whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.