Luis Walter Alvarez Quotes

#1. Because Ernest Lawrence's award came in the war years, I had the unusual opportunity of attending his Nobel Prize presentation ceremony.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#2. I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#3. When I received my B. S. degree in 1932, only two of the fundamental particles of physics were known.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#4. Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."

Luis Walter Alvarez

#5. Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#6. There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#7. If the president of the college had asked me what I thought about Dewey McLean, I'd say he's a weak sister. I thought he'd been knocked out of the ball game and had just disappeared, because nobody invites him to conferences anymore.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#8. [My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#9. One indicator of Ernest Lawrence's influence is the fact that I am the eighth member of his laboratory staff to receive the highest award that can come to a scientist - the Nobel Prize.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#10. Janet Landis came to work in my group in the summer of 1957 when our first bubble-chamber was churning out its earliest pictures.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#11. At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, we have long had a tradition of close cooperation between physicists and technicians.

Luis Walter Alvarez