Sir Arthur Eddington
Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.
Something unknown is doing we don't know what.
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.
The mathematics is not there till we put it there.
It is a primitive form of thought that things exist or do not exist.