Involvement Quotes (5 quotes)
I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!
Nobel banquet speech (10 Dec 1967). In Ragnar Granit (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1967 (1968).
If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.
As reported by Heisenberg describing Schrödinger’s time spent debating with Bohr in Copenhagen (Sep 1926). In Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (1971), 75. As cited in John Gribbin, Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution.
On the Enquirer I specialized in news of organized labor. … The dock and timber workers and the migratory farm laborers…were drawn to communism. The California State Legislature had passed a strong bill defining criminal syndicalism and making it a felony. The politicians were looking for a place to use it. On November 9, 1919, I was the only reporter from a conservative paper to cover the organization meeting of the Communist Labor Party of California, as it was then called. I wrote lurid and sensational stories about this small group of…persons, which resulted in indictments against them, and which required that I had to testify against them, in trial after trial, over the next several years. In this connection I became aware of open boasting by a police detective of his having framed some of the defendants in a matter where I knew the facts to be otherwise. The effect of this involvement on me was to wipe out any desire to be…[a] newspaperman; so I entered the university and went into physical science largely as a means of escape from the corruption of the world, in addition to the fact that I was genuinely interested in physical science.
As a high school student in Oakland, California, Condon had rival interests in journalism and science, and became a reporter for the Oakland Enquirer. That had a lasting effect on his attitude toward government and society. As described in his autobiographical 'Reminiscences of a Life in and out of Quantum Mechanics', Proceedings of the International Symposium on Atomic, Molecular, Solid State Theory and Quantum Biology, Sanibel Island, Florida' (22 Jan 1973), published in International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (1973), 7, 7-22; collected in Asim O. Barut, Halis Odabasi and Alwyn van der Merwe (eds.), Selected Popular Writings of E.U. Condon (1991), 316-317.
The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.
In 'On Science and Certainty', Discover Magazine (Oct 1980)
To connect the dinosaurs, creatures of interest to everyone but the veriest dullard, with a spectacular extraterrestrial event like the deluge of meteors … seems a little like one of those plots that a clever publisher might concoct to guarantee enormous sales. All the Alvarez-Raup theories lack is some sex and the involvement of the Royal family and the whole world would be paying attention to them.
In The Canberra Times (20 May 1984).
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) -- 
