Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. Quotes

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.

I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.

The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

To a theoretical physicist, there is no greater joy than to see that this curious activity we call calculation - the depositing of ink on paper, followed by throwing away the paper and depositing new ink on more paper - can actually tell us something about reality.

I thought I should study physics because it's fundamental to all science.

In A Brief History Of Time I used the word "God" like Einstein did as a shorthand for the laws of physics. However, this is not what most people mean by God, so I have decided not to use the term. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a God.

I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

A scientifically unimportant discovery is one which, however true and however interesting for other reasons, has no consequences for a system of theory with which scientists in that field are concerned.

The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

Science is prediction, not explanation.