Research Environment Quotes

In all the years with IBM Research, I have especially appreciated the freedom to pursue the activities I found interesting and greatly enjoyed the stimulus, collegial cooperation, frankness, and intellectual generosity of two scientific communities, namely in superconductivity and critical phenomena.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

You'll remember Newton was furious at Leibniz, because he developed calculus at the same time. And he went to his death believing that he had copied him. And no, it's because all the elements were there, so it's almost inevitable that the next discovery - as long as people are free and allowed to experiment and try new things.

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do.

If you go into any physics lab, everybody is depressed and feels isolated. We don't get any feedback that anybody cares about what we're doing.

If you can promise a vital and vibrant research environment as well as great students to your faculty, you can recruit some top faculty. The top faculty on your roster will then help you to attract further top students in your program.

A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

My decision to come to Bell Telephone Laboratories immediately after obtaining my Ph.D. in 1936 was strongly influenced by the fact that my supervisor would be C. J. Davisson.

[At DuPont,] I was very fortunate that I worked under men who were very much interested in making discoveries and inventions. They were very much interested in what they were doing, and they left me alone. And I was able to experiment on my own, and I found this very stimulating. It appealed to the creative person in me.

I believe always you should have a philanthropic heart inside but business way. Because you have to get things done. That is what scientists tell us how to do properly. Business should tell us how to get things done efficiently. And government should have the good environment and the foundations of researching.

I have suggested that scientific progress requires a favorable environment.

(Japanese Government believes that if you have a big laboratory with all the latest equipment and good funding it will automatically lead to creativity. It doesn't work that way.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.

Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries

I found that my career at Bell Telephone Labs thrived because of the environment, which encouraged cooperative research, offered opportunities for access to sophisticated equipment, and fellowship.

The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.

I did most of my Ph.D. in Washington. They used to bring black kids through the lab for tours, and I was one of the few black researchers.

Leaving England was a painful decision, and we still have some regrets about it. However, at that time, the research environment for theoretical chemistry was clearly better in the U.S.

Therapeutic cloning research was approved last January by a large majority of the British Parliament. This means that British researchers will soon be publishing reports of their research techniques in international science journals. Leading American scientists, frustrated by the unwelcoming research environment here, will join them overseas. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act therefore cannot possibly prevent an increase in knowledge about cloning technology. It can only deprive Americans of the medical benefits that therapeutic cloning will bring.

I am grateful to my colleagues at Brandeis and to the unusual environment here that allows researchers to explore without boundaries while also engaging students in the process of discovery. This is a very special - perhaps unique - university.

I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.

We must nurture creative scientists in an environment that encourages interactions and collaborations across different fields, and support research free from weighty bureaucracies.

I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research.