Clique Quotes (2 quotes)
Conferences with open attendance are very important for the stimulation of young people or other people who are new in the field. … The field of high-energy physics is, as you know, very strongly in the hands of a clique and it is hard for an outsider to enter.
From Letter to J. Howard McMillen (14 Mar 1960), in collection of Raymond Thayer Birge, Correspondence and Papers, Box 29, Folder 'Weisskopf, Victor Frederick, 1908-', Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. As quoted and cited in David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2009), 336.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
In Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), 33.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
