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Manfred Eigen
(9 May 1927 - 6 Feb 2019)
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Science Quotes by Manfred Eigen (6 quotes)
A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
— Manfred Eigen
Everything which is new has to come out of fundamental research otherwise it’s not new.
— Manfred Eigen
One could say you can't do any experiment which exceeds the lifetime of a Ph.D. student.
— Manfred Eigen
The “big bang” … set matter whirling in a maelstrom of activity that would never cease. The forces of order sought to bring this process under control, to tame chance. The result was not the rigid order of a crystal but the order of life. From the outset, chance has been the essential counterpart of the ordering forces.
— Manfred Eigen
There’s no evolution of single individuals. Evolution is the property of populations.
— Manfred Eigen
We are just beginning to understand how molecular reaction systems have found a way to “organize themselves”. We know that processes of this nature ultimately led to the life cycle, and that (for the time being?) Man with his central nervous system, i.e. his memory, his mind, and his soul, stands at the end of this development and feels compelled to understand this development. For this purpose he must penetrate into the smallest units of time and space, which also requires new ideas to make these familiar concepts from physics of service in understanding what has, right into our century, appeared to be beyond the confines of space and time.
— Manfred Eigen
Quotes by others about Manfred Eigen (1)
I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average.
See also:
- 9 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Eigen's birth.