21 quotes
It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.
Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced. … The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character.
I do not know if you appreciate the fact that long papers have a way of frightening readers, who feel that they have not time to dip into them.
It is just as surprising as if a gunner fired a shell at a single sheet of paper and for some reason or other the projectile bounded back again.
The study of the radio-active substances and of the discharge of electricity through gases has supplied very strong experimental evidence in support of the fundamental ideas of the existing atomic theory. It has also indicated that the atom itself is not the smallest unit of matter but is a complicated structure made up of a number of smaller bodies.
Radio-activity (1904)
Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.
Attributed
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
Attributed Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (1973)
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life.
Attributed The Wit and Wisdom of the 20th Century : A Dictionary of Quotations (1987)
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Attributed Rutherford at Manchester (1962)
We've got no money, so we've got to think.
Attributed
I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist.
Attributed
We're like children who always want to take apart watches to see how they work.
Attributed
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Attributed
I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.
Attributed
I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in colour, according to taste.
Attributed
I know what the atom looks like!
Attributed
That which is not measurable is not science. — also attributed to Lord Kelvin
Attributed
"...Rutherford never spent more than £2500 a year on his research programme. He resisted suggestions that an industrial appeal might provide him with more money and he did not believe in the economic significance of any of the work he was doing. He used to boast that ‘we have no money, so we shall have to think’."
Attributed
It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.
Attributed The Birth of a New Physics (1959)
The first point that arises is the atom. I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in colour, according to taste. In order to explain the facts, however, the atom cannot be regarded as a sphere of material, but rather as a sort of wave motion of a peculiar kind. The theory of wave-mechanics, however bizarre it may appear... has the astonishing virtue that it works, and works in detail, so that it is now possible to understand and explain things which looked almost impossible in earlier days. One of the problems encountered is the relation between the electron, an atom and the radiation produced by them jointly; the new mechanics states the type of radiation emitted with correct numerical relations. When applied to the periodic table, a competent and laborious mathematician can predict the periodic law from first principles.
Attributed