Hard Work Quotes - Page 32

• I am an experimenter, or rather I used to be one. Then I stopped working, and since then people think I am a theoretician.

  George Placzek

  Science, Thinking, People

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• I believe scientists have a duty to share the excitement and pleasure of their work with the general public, and I enjoy the challenge of presenting difficult ideas in an understandable way.

  Antony Hewish

  Believe, Science, Ideas

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• If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.

  Alfred Tarski

  Wall, Science, Men

  "Semantics and the Philosophy of Language" edited by L. Linsky, Urbana, (p. 41), 1952.

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• If the double helix was so important, how come you didn't work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.

  Ava Helen Pauling

  Husband, Science, Important

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• If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.

  Richard Hamming

  Important, Problem, Ifs

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• In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment. ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed.

  Martin Ryle

  Encouragement, Science, Discovery

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• In such sad circumstances I but see myself exalted by my own enemies, for in order to defeat some small works of mine they try to make the whole rational medicine and anatomy fall, as if I were myself these noble disciplines.

  Marcello Malpighi

  Fall, Sadness, Order

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• In the discovery of lemmas the best aid is a mental aptitude for it. For we may see many who are quick at solutions and yet do not work by method ; thus Cratistus in our time was able to obtain the required result from first principles, and those the fewest possible, but it was his natural gift which helped him to the discovery.

  Proclus

  Science, Discovery, Principles

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• It is always the case with the best work, that it is misrepresented, and disparaged at first, for it takes a curiously long time for new ideas to become current, and the older men who ought to be capable of taking them in freely, will not do so through prejudice.

  Francis Galton

  Men, Ideas, Long

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• It is important to go into work you would like to do. Then it doesn't seem like work. You sometimes feel it's almost too good to be true that someone will pay you for enjoying yourself. I've been very fortunate that my work led to useful drugs for a variety of serious illnesses. The thrill of seeing people get well who might otherwise have died of diseases like leukemia, kidney failure, and herpes virus encephalitis cannot be described in words.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Get Well, Serious Illness, People

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• It is very remarkable that while the words Eternal, Eternity, Forever, are constantly in our mouths, and applied without hesitation, we yet experience considerable difficulty in contemplating any definite term which bears a very large proportion to the brief cycles of our petty chronicles. There are many minds that would not for an instant doubt the God of Nature to have existed from all Eternity, and would yet reject as preposterous the idea of going back a million of years in the History of His Works. Yet what is a million, or a million million, of solar revolutions to an Eternity?

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Nature, Science, Years

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• Man is not only part of a field, but a part and member of his group. When people are together, as when they are at work, then the most unnatural behavior, which only appears in late stages or abnormal cases, would be to behave as separate Egos. Under normal circumstances they work in common, each a meaningfully functioning part of the whole.

  Max Wertheimer

  Men, People, Ego

  "The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler" edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher, (p. 11), 1954.

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• Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the Huxley Medal. When one is old, one wants no encouragement and one goes on with one's work to the extent of one's power, because it has become habitual.

  Karl Pearson

  Encouragement, Science, Goes On

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• More and more of out colleagues fail to understand our work because of the high specialization of research problems. We must not be discouraged if the products of our labor are not read or even known to exist. The joy of research must be found in doing since every other harvest is uncertain.

  Theobald Smith

  Science, Joy, Understanding

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• Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

  W. W. Rouse Ball

  Writing, Exercise, Science

  W. W. Rouse Ball (2012). “A Short Account of the History of Mathematics”, p.287, Courier Corporation

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• No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption of knowledge, claiming to understand everything.

  John B. Jervis

  Knowledge, Science, Reflection

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• No organization engaged in any specific field of work ever invents any important developers in that field, or adopts any important development in that field until forced to do so by outside competition.

  Reginald Fessenden

  Science, Organization, Adoption

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• No research will answer all queries that the future may raise. It is wiser to praise the work for what it has accomplished and then to formulate the problems still to be solved.

  Theobald Smith

  Science, Accomplishment, Research

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• One of my guiding principles is don't do anything that other people are doing. Always do something a little different if you can. The concept is that if you do it a little differently there is a greater potential for reward than if you the same thing that other people are doing. I think that this kind of goal for one's work, having obviously the maximum risk, would have the maximum reward no matter what the field may be.

  Seymour Cray

  Science, Thinking, Guiding Principles

  Interview with David K. Allison for the Smithsonian Institution, May 9, 1995.

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• Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.

  Richard Hamming

  Science, Differences, Different

  "Turing Award lecture". Journal of the ACM 16 (1), p. 7, January, 1969.

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• Rejoice when other scientists do not believe what you know to be true. It will give you extra time to work on it in peace. When they start claiming that they have discovered it before you, look for a new project.

  Efraim Racker

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

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• Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

  John Bardeen

  Science, People, Effort

  Nobel Banquet Speech, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1972.

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• That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life-this our mother [Marie Curie] has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.

  Irene Joliot-Curie

  Mother, Independent, Science

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• The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine-that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.

  James Prescott Joule

  Science, Animal, Perfect

  James Prescott Joule (2011). “The Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule”, p.271, Cambridge University Press

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• The Author of nature has not given laws to the universe, which, like the institutions of men, carry in themselves the elements of their own destruction; he has not permitted in his works any symptom of infancy or of old age, or any sign by which we may estimate either their future or their past duration. He may put an end, as he no doubt gave a beginning, to the present system at some determinate period of time; but we may rest assured, that this great catastrophe will not be brought about by the laws now existing, and that it is not indicated by any thing which we perceive.

  John Playfair

  Nature, Science, Past

  John Playfair, Adam Ferguson, Gordon Younger Craig (1997). “James Hutton & Joseph Black: Biographies”

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