Ernest Rutherford

"It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you."

"Rutherfords discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. ...The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay...The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. ...Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics."

"Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929... [They] became firm friends and Gamows insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator."

"One can hardly speak of being friendly with a force of nature."

"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."

"Dont let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department."

"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid."

"That which is not measurable is not science. — also attributed to Lord Kelvin"

"I know what the atom looks like!"

"Were like children who always want to take apart watches to see how they work."

"It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected."

"It is just as surprising as if a gunner fired a shell at a single sheet of paper and for some reason or other the projectile bounded back again."