Ernest Rutherford Quotes

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

I was going to be a scientist.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

I have always focused on basic research, motivated by a desire to understand the world.

If you don't invest in basic research at some stage you start losing the basis of applied research.

I also found out that I liked biochemical research and that I could do it.

NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied research; to me, it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature.

Science is what scientists do.

When scientists are asked what they are working on, their response is seldom 'Finding the origin of the universe' or 'Seeking to cure cancer.' Usually, they will claim to be tackling a very specific problem - a small piece of the jigsaw that builds up the big picture.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

I'm really focused on my research almost 100 percent. That, and my family and kids.

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems.

You don't say to a university professor who is immersed in a particular subject that they should get a life. They are encouraged to enjoy their subject and to pass it on.

It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.

Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision ten thousand times, and we can now 'see' the individual atoms and molecules.

Real science is a very risky activity; people can spend their whole life working on a theory that doesn’t work out.

We are not particularly interested in the prestige of space, but in the scientific aspects of it.

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered.

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery.