Nobel Laureates From The United States

"I like to talk about renormalization as an epistemological barrier. … Nature has been kind, and nature has been unkind. … for what it's worth, I don't tell people what kind of research to do. I have been wrong many, many times in anticipating what will happen. … I’ve learned the hard way that the art of good physics is to ask a question that’s just barely beyond where the technology can go, and then you place your bets. And if you’re right you win the bet, and if you’re wrong you lose."

"When a thing gets very, very small, you can't tell the difference between a solid and a liquid. (16:30 in video)"

"Of course, if electrons were waves there would be no difficulty. We think we understand the regular reflection of light and of x-rays--and we should understand the reflec- tion of electrons as well if electrons were only waves instead of particles. This observation though true does not seem a particularly valuable one. It is rather as if one were to see a rabbit climbing a tree, and were to say, "Well, that is rather a strange thing for a rabbit to be doing, but after all there is really nothing to get excited about. Cats climb trees --so that, if the rabbit were only a cat, we would understand its behavior perfectly." Of course, the explanation might be that what we took to be a rabbit was not a rabbit at all, but was actually a cat. Is it possible that we are mistaken about electrons? Is it possible that we have been wrong all this time in supposing that they are particles, and that actually they are waves? Well, 1 do not need to enumerate to you the many reasons we have for believing--I may say for knowing--that electrons are actually particles."

"Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before."

"Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context."

"The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark."

"The ideal student would be one who was not working for grades but was working because he was interested in the work and not trying to compete with fellow students."

"... Carl Anderson told me what life was like after he got his Ph.D. under Millikan in 1930. Dirac had proposed the existence of a partner to the electron, its antiparticle, and Carl wanted to find it by converting γ-rays found in the debris of cosmic rays into what we now call electron-positron pairs. He needs to get a big magnet, and build a cloud chamber with a lead plate and camera. When he asks Millikan for money, Millikan reaches into his pocket and gives him some. Carl goes to a couple of junk shops for supplies and gets to work. When the magnet, cloud chamber, and camera are finished, Carl puts them, together with food and a sleeping bag, into his old Model T Ford, and drives up the unpaved Mount Wilson Observatory road into the San Gabriel Mountains behind Pasadena. Carl is on his way to discovering the positron."

"It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning."

"In science, conjecture drives both experiment and theory for it is only by forming conjectures (hypotheses) that we can make the direction of our experiments and theories informed. If such and such is true, then I should be able to do this experiment and look for this particular result or I should be able to find this theoretical formulation. Conversely, experiment and theory drive conjecture. One makes a startling observation or has a sudden insight and begins to speculate on its significance and implications and to draw possible conclusions (conjecture)."

"A gifted experimentalist, and theoretician, in the best Newtonian tradition... His contributions to quantum measurements, and elucidative teachings on quantum mechanics, have not yet received the attention they deserve."

"A rare theorist turned experimentalist."

"At the first of the 1960's Rochester Coherence Conferences, I suggested that a license be required for use of the word photon, and offered to give such license to properly qualified people."

"I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems."

"In fact, there really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out."

"In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved."

"Neither Dirac nor von Neumann discussed his measurements in physical terms."

"I always look for colleagues who are smart, and who know a lot in many fields. The obvious advantage is that he or she may be able to solve the problem that has produced trouble in your work. Also smart and knowledgeable colleagues can save you time, and are interesting and inspiring!"

"The best colleagues are those who will think about your ideas, who will talk with you and offer insight, constructive criticism. No one needs to be crushed for having a new idea."

"You may turn a bad idea into a good idea — don't kill the bad idea prematurely. A bad idea can evolve into a good idea."

"Imagination and obsession are the keys to getting a good idea. To help your imagination keep your eyes and ears open. Avoid the "not invented here prejudice"."

"For every good idea, expect to have five, ten, twenty wrong or useless ideas. You cannot avoid the bad ideas if you keep your imagination free. There is no spam filter for bad ideas."

"Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility."

"Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere."

"The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed."

"It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built."

"...the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air."

"You only have one life. Whatever crops up, crops up."

"The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. … I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature."

"The problem of transmitting scientific knowledge is a very difficult business."

"It is clear to me that under the right conditions, future technologies will be created that we cannot even imagine."

"Young people should be given good support and freedom in their research. They are the greatest source of scientific creativity because they are not as committed to existing scientific orthodoxy, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to push new ideas."

"We should willingly take risks in supporting new projects. The tendency is to play it safe when funding is low, but we need to remember that the greatest risks have the greatest payoffs."

"Excessive bureaucracy is distracting, time-consuming, and destructive to creativity."

"It has been reported that when Michelson was asked towards the end of his life, why he had devoted such a large fraction of his time, to the measurement of the velocity of light, he replied "it was so much fun"."

"Innovation is the key to the future, but basic research is the key to future innovation."

"Relativity was born of an epistemological shock; it was born of the "failure" of the Michelson experiment. ...Is so little required to "shake" the universe of spatiality? Can a single experiment... annihilate... two or three centuries of rational thought? Yes, a single decimal sufficed, as our poet Henri de Regnier would say, to "make all nature sing." ...The Michelson experiment, at first so particular in character, will form the basis of the most far-reaching generalization."

"Before entering into these details, however, it may be well to reply to the very natural question: What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second—an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject matter of these lectures."

"Creativity is the basis of all innovation, and although it is doubtful that it can be taught, creativity should be nurtured in those who have it."

"Now, the velocity of wave propagation can be seen, without the aid of any mathematical analysis, to depend on the elasticity of the medium and its density; for we can see that if a medium is highly elastic the disturbance would be propagated at a great speed."

"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

"It is... striking that the Michelson laboratory was, properly speaking, cosmic. There, the most artificial physics imaginable was referred to the space of the world. The decimal which they wished to reveal by means of the interferometer, the decimal which is of the order of three-fourths of the wavelength of a vibration of light, was related to the orbital speed of the earth, a speed of the order of eighteen miles per second. The precision of such a question... this attempt to experience the immobility of space in its cosmic significance, ought to set the metaphysicians thinking who study the place of man in the world; if only these metaphysicians would give their attention to the lengthy discursive processes which lead science to build new intuitions."

"It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration."

"But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job."

"At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always."

"Lucas’s “Mechanics” Lectures caught the profession by surprise. His argument enraged some economists and startled or puzzled others. It was his first word on the subject of growth. It seemed to have come completely out of the blue. And even though his interest in the possibility of market failure seemed curiously in tune with fifty years of the Keynesian tradition, it was unfamiliar enough when expressed in the vernacular of Freshwater economics that the lectures at first caused more consternation than anything else, and in most quarters they were studiously ignored. A few young researchers, however, were galvanized into immediate action. The notion that trade and migration must be strongly linked to economic growth was hardly new. Nor was the insight that cities must be central to economic progress. Perhaps the real news from Lucas’s lectures was his identification of lock-in as a potentially serious puzzle."

"Lucas says: "You don't know anything," and in his more humble moments: "I don't know anything either, and therefore the government shouldn't do anything." Well, there is no well-defined criterion of the government's not doing anything. What he says the government should do and calls doing nothing is doing something very different from what the government has been doing for the last 40 years. Why is making a radical change of regime suddenly doing nothing? You see, we have had a regime that can be associated with the most successful period of capitalism in recorded history. Suddenly, he calls for a constant money growth rule. How, possibly, can one conclude that? I say, if he doesn't want "to do anything", then we should keep doing what we have been doing, for we haven't been doing that badly. To make a radical change in regime all of a sudden, gives us what we have now; a new depression. Right? We have a new regime now, or maybe we have if it is not overturned, partly because these guys come along saying that compensatory policy, that is Keynesian policy, got us in all kinds of trouble. But it didn't get us in all kinds of trouble. In effect, they say that if you don't know what you are doing, you should do something entirely different from what you have been doing. I don't understand why that is a conservative or risk-avoiding policy."

"A lot of the Lucas critiques were the sort of thing that some of us used in debunking Friedman's positivism on the stable money supply. I thought that Lucas's Nobel Prize was richly deserved and even overdue. But it was not because of the boldness and the correctness of the New Classical theory and rational expectations (that there is some kind of expected value that a group mind gets as a result, and which is in some sense "correct"). I don't believe in macro efficiency of securities markets. I believe in their micro efficiency. Convertibles are priced about right. Black-Scholes derivatives are priced about right, because you can make a lot of money in correcting any deviation. You can't make money in a bubble, by fighting the bubble. You will lose your shirt. That means the bubble can go on, and bubbles go in both directions. Usually maybe they do not last as long in the downward direction because the correction is more severe. In fact, the supply shocks of the 1970s which made either fiscal or central policy very difficult to administer, gave poor performance to the macro system. And since the Keynesians had implicitly been boastful about the good performance, if you take credit for the sun you got to expect to be blamed for the rain. And not only was that puncturing the reputation of Keynesianism, but it was puncturing the self-esteem of economists and of Keynesian economists in particular. Because we always are looking in the mirror of the public to form our impression of how important we are."

"Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous – that is, by laughing at it – so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique."

"He didn't really discuss my interpretations and criticisms of new classical economics. Instead he took the opportunity of the review to say that Keynesian economics was discredited by the stagflation of the '70s, as he and Sargent had already argued in their polemical piece "After Keynesian Economics" at the Nantucket conference in 1978. The idea seems to be that we were very wrong about the 1970s and therefore had no standing to criticize the new classical macroeconomics. Of course, I do not agree with that interpretation of the events of the last 15 years. In that review article Lucas didn't explain anything new. He just restated his point of view."