Nobel Laureates In Physics

"In 1958, Landau and certain other seminar participants were highly enthusiastic about the new Heisenberg theory in which all particles arise from a universal fermion field. (Others, however, took a highly skeptical view of this theory.) At one seminar Landau received a letter through Pontecorvo, supposedly from Pauli, and Landau read it aloud. In the brief letter, Pauli wrote that he liked Heisenberg's theory, that he'd found new arguments in its favor and found it highly plausible. Moreover, wrote Pauli, the latest experiments with Λ hyperons confirm Heisenberg's theory. No details were given about these experiments, though. There was great excitement: after all, Pauli was known as a person with a critical turn of mind, far from gullible. Different hypotheses were advanced; one young theorist even went up to the board and tried to imagine what the experiment could be that Pauli wrote of. Meanwhile, Migdal took the letter, read it carefully and said, "Something's strange here. If you read the first letters of all the lines from top to bottom, it spells the Russian word 'fools.' What could that mean?" The secret was simple: The letter was written by Migdal and Pontecorvo."

"BEWARE, HE BITES!"

"The idea seems to exist that there can be an absolutely continuous transition between the liquid and crystalline state (analogous to the transition liquid-gas), which would require the existence of a miraculous state which is neither isotropic nor anisotropic."

"People who hear of some extraordinary phenomenon start proposing to explain it with improbable hypotheses. First consider the simplest explanation: that it's all nonsense."

"A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries."

"In the 1930s Landau was already saying, "I am one of the few universal physicists"; after the death of Enrico Fermi, this became "I am the last of the universal physicists"."

"Главное, делайте всё с увлечением, это страшно украшает жизнь."

"This work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately, everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting, is not new."

"Once, lecturing in Moscow during his last visit to the USSR, Niels Bohr was asked how he had succeeded in creating such a famous and first-class school of theoretical physics. He answered: "Probably because I have never been ashamed of admitting to my students that I am a fool." Bohr's lecture was translated into Russian by Landau's closest collaborator, E. Lifshitz, who translated it: "Probably because I have never been ashamed to tell my students that they are fools." Lifshitz's mistranslation caused a lot of laughter among the listeners. Lifshitz became aware of his mistake, corrected himself, and apologized. Kapitza, who was present, remarked that this mistranslation had not been accidental at all: "Precisely here lies the difference between Bohr's and Landau's schools of theoretical physics.""

"In 1956 Shapiro had been very actively investigating the so-called $\tau-\theta$ problem, which had been puzzling physicists for a long time. Shapiro came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation could be the parity non-conservation in this decay of mesons... Landau, when Shapiro presented him the paper, laughed at such an idea -- without Landau's holy consent Shapiro's paper could not be published. It remained on his desk, where I saw it many months before Lee and Yang submitted their paper for publication. So, because of Landau, Soviet physics lost one Nobel prize. A similar case is reported by Landau's closest collaborator, A.A. Abrikosov. Landau's negative attitude to Abrikosov's theory had delayed the discovery of superconductivity II for about four years."

"I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas."

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is."

"It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly. This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either. The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers."

"Incomplete knowledge of the future, and also of the past of the transmitter from which the future might be constructed, is at the very basis of the concept of information. On the other hand, complete ignorance also precludes communication; a common language is required, that is to say an agreement between the transmitter and the receiver regarding the elements used in the communication process... [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.' These data comprise both the convention regarding the symbols and the language used, and the knowledge available at the moment when the message started."

"My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist."

"Who ordered that?"

"What more do you want, mermaids?"

"I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity."

"The benefits of medical research are real - but so are the potential horrors of genetic engineering and embryo manipulation. We devise heart transplants, but do little for the 15 million who die annually of malnutrition and related diseases. Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom."

"[Ryle] lived through an epic period of scientific history, starting his career in the turmoil of wartime electronic countermeasures, and turning eventually to a deep concern about the future of mankind in the age of nuclear power and warfare."

"The glorious years of discovery in radio astronomy in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge were dominated by the personality of Martin Ryle."

"[The steady-state theory] was a minority view, but [Hoyle] and a few like-minded theorists were able to keep the plate spinning for years. Another Cambridge luminary, Martin Ryle, finally brought it crashing down. An irascible, hardheaded experimenter, Ryle thought theorists like Hoyle were daffy. In a colloquium on sunspots, Mitton reports, Ryle became so incensed by Hoyle's speculations that he dashed to the blackboard and angrily erased the equations."

"We must put our energies into solving the difficult problems, in many disciplines, which are involved in renewable sources - on which both the developed and the developing countries must eventually depend."

"If we are to survive, we must not accept the official indoctrination of the purpose of nuclear 'power' stations, radiation health risks, the 'need' for further nuclear weapons and the reality of nuclear war."

"America has grown by expansion in a practical vacuum; the pioneers of the West had to overcome terrific natural obstacles, but negligible human resistance. The Russia of today had to conquer not only natural but human difficulties: she had to break up the rotten system of the Czars and to assimilate backward Asiatic tribes; now she has set herself the task of bringing her brand of modernization to the ancient civilizations of the Far East. For this purpose it is indispensable to have a well-defined doctrine full of slogans, which appeals to the needs and instincts of the poverty-stricken masses. Thus one understands the power which Marx's philosophy has gained in the East. What can we scientists do in this conflict? We can join the spiritual, religious, philosophical forces, which reject war on ethical grounds. We can even attack the ideological foundations of the conflict itself. For science is not only the basis of technology but also the material for a sound philosophy."

"In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe. One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation."

"There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are "beyond physics" indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that "belief" must be discarded and replaced by "the scientific method.""

"The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom."

"I must give some attention to the delicate question of religion, on which I have touched already. In my father's generation this question still was discussed with passion. Since then a sort of truce has existed in the countries of the West, while in the communist states of the East atheism has been made into the State religion. It is not advisable to blow on the embers of such controversies. But as I am talking about the limitations of our physical world picture I cannot but say that I do not believe in transgressions of the laws of nature. As these laws are of a statistical nature, and therefore allow deviations from the norm, I must define more clearly what I mean. The statistical deviations themselves obey certain laws. The miraculous events of religious tradition, however, are of a different kind, they lie on a different plane altogether; they are meant to prove something lying entirely beyond scientific consideration, such as the power of prayer, the intervention of divine power for or against certain men or nations."

"The continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones."

"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics). It has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity), which are applicable far beyond physics."

"Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless."

"The scientist's urge to investigate, like the faith of the devout or the inspiration of the artist, is an expression of mankind's longing for something fixed, something at rest in the universal whirl: God, Beauty, Truth. Truth is what the scientist aims at. He finds nothing at rest, nothing enduring, in the universe. Not everything is knowable, still less predictable. But the mind of man is capable of grasping and understanding at least a part of Creation; amid the flight of phenomena stands the immutable pole of law."

"Can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, or a particle? And if not, what is the reality which our theory has been invented to describe? The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy. … Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally used system of concepts in which particles and waves appear simultaneously, can be completely justified. The latest research on nuclei and elementary particles has led us, however, to limits beyond which this system of concepts itself does not appear to suffice. The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road."

"I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest."

"If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success."

"The dance of atoms, electrons and nuclei, which in all its fury is subject to God's eternal laws, has been entangled with another restless Universe which may well be the Devil's: the human struggle for power and domination, which eventually becomes history. My optimistic enthusiasm about the disinterested search for truth has been severely shaken. I wonder at my simplemindedness when I re-read what I said on the modern fulfilment of the alchemists dream: "Now however, the motive is not the lust for gold, cloaked by the mystery of magic arts, but the scientists' pure curiosity. For it is clear from the beginning that we may not expect wealth too." Gold means power, power to rule and to have a big share in the riches of this world. Modern alchemy is even a short-cut to this end, it provides power directly; a power to dominate and to threaten and hurt on a scale never heard of before. And this power we have actually seen displayed in ruthless acts of warfare, in the devastation of whole cities and the destruction of their population."

"He felt that what is called “Copenhagen interpretation” should be called “Göttingen interpretation,” and was a bit hurt that he got the Nobel rather late."

"While Born evidently realised that our extended order no longer gratified primitive instincts, he too failed to examine closely the structures that create and maintain this order, or to see that our instinctual morals have over the past five thousand years or more gradually been replaced or restrained. Thus, although perceiving that 'science and technology have destroyed the ethical basis of civilisation, perhaps irreparably', he imagines that they have done so by the facts they have uncovered rather than by their having systematically discredited beliefs that fail to satisfy certain 'standards of acceptability' demanded by constructivist rationalism (see below). While admitting that `no one has yet devised a means of keeping society together without traditional ethical principles', Born yet hopes that these can be replaced 'by means of the traditional method used in science'. He too fails to see that what lies between instinct and reason cannot be replaced by 'the traditional method used in science'."

"He [Einstein] calls my way of describing the physical world 'incomplete'; in his eyes this is a flaw which he hopes to see removed, while I am prepared to put up with it. I have in fact always regarded it as a step forward, because an exact description of the state of a physical system presupposes that one can make statements of infinite precision about it, and this seems absurd to me. It seems to me that I have followed Einstein's own way of thinking in accordance with his theory of relativity, which recognizes the impossibility of locating any point in time and space absolutely, and therefore concludes that the concept of absolute place and time determination does not make sense. This is at the base of the whole of his mighty edifice. But he did not want to acknowledge the analogy of the situation in the quantum theory."

"The world of Man's experience is infinitely rich and manifold, but chaotic and involved with the experiencing being. This being strives to arrange his impressions and to agree with others concerning them. Language and art, with their numerous modes of expression, are such ways of transmission from mind to mind, complete in their way where objects of the sense-world are concerned, but not well suited to the communication of exact ideas concerning the outer world. This marks the beginning of the task of science. From the multitude of experiences it selects a few simple forms, and constructs from them, by thought, an objective world of things. In physics, all 'experience' consists of the activity of constructing apparatus and of reading pointer instruments. Yet the results thereby obtained suffice to re-create the cosmos by thought. At first images are formed which are much influenced by observation; gradually, the conceptions become more and more abstract, old ideas are rejected and replaced by new ones. But, however far the constructed world of things departs from observation, nevertheless it is indissolubly linked at its boundaries to the perceptions of the sense, and there is no statement of the most abstract theory that does not express, ultimately, a relation between observations. That is why each new observation shakes up the entire structure, so that theories seem to rise and fall. This, however, is precisely what charms and attracts the scientist. The creation of his mind would be a melancholy thing, did it not die and come to life once more."

"J. J. Thomson, by a rotating-mirror method, succeeded in measuring the velocity of the cathode rays, finding it to be 1.9 x 107 cm./sec.; a value so much smaller than that of the velocity of light that it was scarcely possible to conceive of the rays as vibrations of the aether."

"The difficulties which would have to be overcome to make several of the preceding experiments conclusive are so great as to be almost insurmountable."

"As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter."

"If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays."

"The discovery by Monsieur and Madame Curie that a sample of radium gives out sufficient energy to melt half its weight of ice per hour has attracted attention to the question of the source from which the radium derives the energy necessary to maintain the radiation; this problem has been before us ever since the original discovery by Becquerel of the radiation from uranium."

"We see from Lenard's table that a cathode ray can travel through air at atmospheric pressure a distance of about half a centimetre before the brightness of the phosphorescence falls to about half its original value. Now the mean free path of the molecules of air at this pressure is about 10-5 cm., and if a molecule of air were projected it would lose half its momentum in a space comparable with the mean free path. Even if we suppose that it is not the same molecule that is carried, the effect of the obliquity of the collisions would reduce the momentum to half in a short multiple of that path. Thus, from Lenard's experiments on the absorption of the rays outside the tube, it follows on the hypothesis that the cathode rays are charged particles moving with high velocities, that the size of the carriers must be small compared with the dimensions of ordinary atoms or molecules. The assumption of a state of matter more finely subdivided than the atom of an element is a somewhat startling one; but a hypothesis that would involve somewhat similar consequences—viz. that the so-called elements are compounds of some primordial element—has been put forward from time to time by various chemists."

"I have described at some length the application of Positive Rays to chemical analysis; one of the main reasons for writing this book was the hope that it might induce others, and especially chemists, to try this method of analysis. I feel sure that there are many problems in chemistry, which could be solved with far greater ease by this than any other method. The method is surprisingly sensitive — more so than even that of spectrum analysis, requires an infinitesimal amount of material, and does not require this to be specially purified; the technique is not difficult if appliances for producing high vacua are available."