Luis Walter Alvarez Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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. But we walk a narrow path with pitfalls on either side. If we spend all our time developing equipment, we risk the appellation of "plumber," and if we merely use the tools developed by others, we risk the censure of our peers for being parasitic.

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

The last few centuries have seen the world freed from several scourges-slavery, for example; death by torture for heretics; and, most recently, smallpox. I am optimistic enough to believe that the next scourge to disappear will be large-scale warfare-killed by the existence and nonuse of nuclear weapons.

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

I'm convinced that a controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist. All the good experimental physicists I have known have had an intense curiosity that no Keep Out sign could mute. Physicists do, of course, show a healthy respect for High Voltage, Radiation, and Liquid Hydrogen signs. They are not reckless. I can think of only six who have been killed on the job.

[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.