John Bardeen Quotes

The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.

Science, for hundreds of years, has spanned the differences between cultures and between countries.

Most achievements in science are to a certain degree group efforts.

The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work.

The hardest problems of pure and applied science can only be solved by the open collaboration of the world-wide scientific community.

Science is a we, not an I. We are so used to star athletes, star entertainers, star politicians, but that is not science.

Today, the solitary inventor has been over-shadowed by groups of scientists.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.

Scientists contribute in a variety of ways and I don't think I can singular one even including [Albert] Einstein, that I can say that he's the best. We don't work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

When you're in a room with twenty people who've all got the True Theory of the universe, it's difficult to know what to do. And the paradox is that so much important science is now being done by huge teams. With Higgs boson, for example, it's estimated there were around ten thousand scientists and engineers involved in building the machines that made this discovery possible.

Science is not like the Olympic Games or something where there's a lot of people all trying to win gold medals, and if you don't get a gold medal, you're nothing. There are actually a lot of people working together and contributing to the science - and the science is the important thing.

It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.

When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.

Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

The publicity of the Nobel Prize has made clear that the research work connected with the Quantum Hall Effect was so successful because a tremendous large number of institutions and individuals supported this activity.

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

In big science, the role of the individual scientist must be carefully preserved. So is the one of original ideas and of contributions.

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.

I hope to see the bringing together of all the best educated people of the earth into a worldwide Congress of Scientists.

Most great advances have been a collaboration. That is the joy of science for me.