Stephen White
(22 Nov 1915 - 27 Mar 1993)
|
Science Quotes by Stephen White (6 quotes)
For more than two years, ever since August 6, 1945, I have been looking at physicists as science writer for The New York Herald Tribune.
— Stephen White
I have, also, a good deal of respect for the job they [physicists] did in the first months after Hiroshima. The world desperately needed information on this new problem in the daily life of the planet, and the physicists, after a slow start, did a good job of giving it to them. It hasn’t come out with a fraction of the efficiency that the teachers might have wished, but it was infinitely more effective than anyone would have dared expect.
— Stephen White
Physicists are people, differing from the common run of humanity only in that from time to time they tend to speak a strange language of their own, much of which they understand.
— Stephen White
Physicists are, as a general rule, highbrows. They think and talk in long, Latin words, and when they write anything down they usually include at least one partial differential and three Greek letters.
— Stephen White
The terminology of the layman is an absence of terminology; the precision of the layman is an accuracy of impression rather than an accuracy of specific fact.
— Stephen White
There may be some interest in one of my own discoveries in physics, entitled, “A Method of Approximating the Importance of a Given Physicist.” Briefly stated, after elimination of all differentials, the importance of a physicist can be measured by observation in the lobby of a building where the American Physical Society is in session. The importance of a given physicist varies inversely with his mean free path as he moves from the door of the meeting-room toward the street. His progress, of course, is marked by a series of scattering collisions with other physicists, during which he remains successively in the orbit of other individuals for a finite length of time. A good physicist has a mean free path of 3.6 ± 0.3 meters. The shortest m.f.p. measured in a series of observations between 1445 and 1947 was that of Oppenheimer (New York, 1946), the figure being 2.7 centimeters. I know. I was waiting for him on the street.
— Stephen White