National Medal Of Science Laureates

"Simple calculations based on a range of variables are better than elaborate ones based on limited input."

"Indeed, in my judgment, the simplest measurements are always the best because they have the least possibility for error and the greatest likelihood of survival."

"The most fruitful research grows out of practical problems."

"If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it."

"It is better to have one seven-foot jumper on your team than any number of six-foot jumpers."

"I most enjoy helping to build something up, taking an unformulated enterprise and making it into what it could become."

"But in the 1950s, many universities saw an advantage in building up all of the sciences and engineering with an eye toward obtaining federal grant money. No single institution did this better than Stanford University. And no one person was more attuned to using federal grants to build a university than its dean of engineering and eventual provost, Frederick Terman. Dr. Terman, trained as an electrical engineer, was an aggressive man with insight and boundless energy. When he began as dean, Stanford University was considered a good private regional school. When he retired as provost, it was arguably the best university for research in the nation."

"In Heisenberg's , the transferred to the particle by the scattered photon makse the particle's momentum uncertain. It is shown that momentum is also transferred when the lack of a scattered photon is used to discover that the particle is absent from the field of view of the microscope (i.e., located outside the light beam). This apparent paradox, a transfer of momentum and/or energy to a missing particle by a light beam (without the scattering of a photon), is discused and "resolved" using quantum measurement theory."

"Is the earth affected by its cosmological setting in the universe? It is to be presumed that the solar system was molded at its birth by galactic conditions which in turn reflected the primordial chaos of the primitive galaxy. However, we are not concerned here with questions of this type, interesting though they are, but rather with a problem of even grander proportions: Is there an effect upon the earth, here and now, of the distribution of matter in the universe? As the universe expands, as distant matter moves away from us, are there effects upon the earth of this changing distribution of matter?"

"I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduly inhibited by theoretical untidyness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus."

"A for which the entrance area, covered with a very large number of randomly distributed pinholes, is 50 per cent open is shown to be a very effective way of forming images of a complex of s. A simple statistical trick is used to reduce the multitudinous overlapping images to a single image. Less than forty detected photons are needed to form an image of a single star."

"Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science..."

"Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not."

"Remember, Aristotle's De Anima is a seamless mixture of the science and philosophy of his time. We can aim at something similar, i.e. we should feel very comfortable using scientific results in philosophy. It does not mean philosophers must become scientists."

"Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's “King Solomon's Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject."

"There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience."

"my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects."

"As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation. My first thought was, "Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!" But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again."

"I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer."

""This is John Lear, Science Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, calling from New York". (Heavy emphasis on "calling from New York," then a long pause waiting for me to recover from the thrill of hearing from such an important person, in New York, no less.) Actually, I did know who he was and had often characterized him as the anti-science editor of the Saturday Review. He continued: "I read of your recent report of the discovery of radiation belts of the Earth and thought that I would do a piece on the subject. What I found remarkable was that such important work had been done at a midwestern state university." Well, I don't think that I responded with any profanity but I did manage to convey a suggestion as to what he could do with his piece and hung up. The next day, the president of my university, Virgil M. Hancher, called me to report that Mr. Lear had called him to complain about my discourtesy. I then gave a brief explanation of my reaction, at the end of which Hancher replied "I promised Lear that I would call you and you may now consider that I have done so. And, by the way, Van, my congratulations!" I never heard from the matter again. It's great to have a boss like that."

"A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working."

"After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: "Space is that in which everything else is." In other words, "Space is the hole that we are in.""

"Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles."

"All this is very good in theory, but in practice, you take a piece of iron, wind a wire around it, then plug the wire in. The core gets hot, the wires smoke, and the fuse blows. So you see, there are practical limitations to theory."

"The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis. A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action."

"With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do."

"Although he was somewhat anti a lot of this stuff, he was very eclectic. He was very broadminded. He realized that sooner or later there was going to be a connection between what went on in the mind and what went on in the brain. Carnegie Mellon was a big place. Newell was in favor of having people do all sorts of things there, so he was basically in favor of having someone who worked on neural nets there. He could see it coming back into fashion. Even though it wasn't what he did, and he didn't really believe in it, he had enough insight to realize that it was going to come back into fashion again... That's how I ended up at CMU. I was very impressed by the fact that Newell was open to getting somebody in an area that he didn't believe in. It's very rare to see that in academics."

"In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing."

"It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines."

"[The] amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied."

"If you think there is nothing problematic or mysterious about a symbol system solving problems, then you are a child of today, whose views have been formed since mid-century. Plato (and by his account, Socrates) found difficulty understanding even how problems could be entertained, much less how they could be solved. Let me remind you of how he posed the conundrum in the Meno:"

"Heuristic Search Hypothesis. The solutions to problems are represented as symbol structures. A physical symbol system exercises its intelligence in problem solving by search—that is, by generating and progressively modifying symbol structures until it produces a solution structure."

"Computer science is an empirical discipline. [...] Each new machine that is built is an experiment. Actually constructing the machine poses a question to nature; and we listen for the answer by observing the machine in operation and analyzing it by all analytical and measurement means available. Each new program that is built is an experiment. It poses a question to nature, and its behavior offers clues to an answer."

"Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness."

"Between 1937 and 1941, Dobzhansky went from being able to allow for the possibility of evolutionary mechanisms other than those he favored to a position in which everything that did not fit his definition of evolution was rejected. In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the mechanisms of speculation that he, or anyone else, for that matter, had proposed. ...it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed."

"The greatest evolutionist of our century."

"No known human group . . . simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species."

"Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

"Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole."

"My genes have indeed determined what I am, but only in the sense that, given the succession of environments and experiences that were mine, a carrier of a different set of genes might have become unlike myself."

"The living world is not a single array . . . connected by unbroken series of intergrades."

"According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event."

"The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth."

"Unangenehme Seher werden meistens als Narren abgeschrieben [Visionaries of uncomfortable truths are mostly dismissed as fools]"

"Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living."

"In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success."

"What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth."

"We do not know what life is, and yet we manipulate it as if it were an inorganic salt solution..."

"Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world."

"I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world."