Does physics describe Reality

• Richard Feynman
  Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled

• Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
  Every statement in physics has to state relations between observable quantities (Mach's Principle)

• James Clerk Maxwell (1813-1879)
  The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter

• Norman David Mermin (1935- )
  The EPR paradox is as close to magic as any physical phenomenon I know of, and magic should be enjoyed. Whether there is physics to be learned by pondering it is less clear.

• Mark Twain (1935-1910)
  There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

• Steven Weinberg
  I think that is one of the great things about physics, that it is sufficiently precise that it makes predictions which can be disproved, and which occasionally are. And when you have that experience, you know that there is something out there that is not all just coming out of your closed society of fellow physicists.

About knowledge formation

• Richard Feynman
  One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time, the thoughts are restricted in a straitjacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is. The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.

  We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as posisble, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work (Nobel Lecture 1964)

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716)
  The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road.

• Norman David Mermin
  Bridges would not be safer if only people who know the proper definition of real numbers were allowed to design them

• Isaac Newton 1642-1727
  (asked how he made his discoveries)
  By always thinking unto them. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.

• Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
  One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling when everyone can see that it doesn't fall

• Victor Weisskopf (1908-)
  Fundamental research sets the standards of modern scientific thought; it creates the intellectual climate in which our modern civilisation florishes. It pumpts the lifeblood of ideas and inventiveness not only into the technological laboratories and factories, but into every cultural activity of our time. (1965)

• (US President's Science Advisory Committee, 1960)
  In science the excellent is not just better than the ordinary; it is almost all that matters. It is therefore fundamental that this country should energetically sustain and strongly reinformce first-rate work where it now exists

• William Henry Bragg(1862-1924)
  After a year's research, one realises it could have been done in a week

• William Lawrence Bragg(1890-1971)
  The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
  Human mind had first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things

  Development of Western Science is based on two great achievments; the invention of a formal logical system (in Euclidean genometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relaions by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all. (1962)

  The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent thinking and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the right idea comes

• Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
  I have had my results for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

• Stephen Jay Gould (1941-)
  Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withold one's provisional consent.

• Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
  Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning