The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of...

I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn’t know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb]...

Svante Arrhenius, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set...

It’s been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental...

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and...

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

The capital … shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. … One-fifth to...

the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these...

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and...

And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man...

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing,...

If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself… For brevity’s sake I shall use the...

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the...

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing...

Strange star-like object over Oslo right before Obama arrives. A gift of a golden medal given by a group of wise men… Nah.

As was the case for Nobel’s own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and...

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence...

I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little.[Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]

[Concerning] phosphorescent bodies, and in particular to uranium salts whose phosphorescence has a very brief duration. With the double sulfate of uranium and potassium … I was able to perform the following experiment: One wraps...

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to...

I am an atheist.