QUOTES
What
do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They
fear solar energy.
We
should downsize all these leftovers from the cold war, make them half the size,
send them twice as often and energize them with solar power.
I want to see us to explore outer space. But I want to do it safely, without the
loss of human life, and democratically: where is the free-wheeling debate on this
question? Only one force can stop this mission: the will of the American people.
They have not been asked. Do they want to endanger their loved ones, their industry
with this launch? One force is more powerful than plutonium, the spirit of the
American people united."
“Thus
the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist,
who must keep the theoreticians honest.”
“There
are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained
only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. Many of these theories
have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness.”
“Saturn is not going away,
... Neither are the planets. What's the rush? Why not delay our space probes a
bit, make them smaller and more sophisticated and use solar power?”
When
scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. For example,
one of the most important revelations in Einstein's early childhood took place
when he read his first books on science. He immediately realized that most of
what he had been taught about religion could not possibly be true. Throughout
his career, however, he clung to the belief that a mysterious, divine Order existed
in the universe. His life's calling, he would say, was to ferret out his thoughts,
to determine whether he had any choice in creating the universe. Einstein repeatedly
referred to this God in his writings, fondly calling him "the Old Man." When stumped
with an intractable mathematical problem, he would often say, "God is subtle,
but not malicious."
