Hermann Bondi Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I am a little unkind to all my many friends in education ... by saying that from the time it learns to talk every child makes a dreadful nuisance of itself by asking 'Why?'. To stop this nuisance society has invented a marvellous system called education which, for the majority of people, brings to an end their desire to ask that question. The few failures of this system are known as scientists. — Hermann Bondi

A theory is scientific only if it can be disproved. But the moment you try to cover absolutely everything the chances are that you cover nothing. — Hermann Bondi

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made. — Hermann Bondi

An opportunity to allow the bees in one's bonnet to buzz even more noisily than usual. — Hermann Bondi

The true contrast between science and religion is that science unites the world and makes it possible for people of widely differing backgrounds to work together and to cooperate. Religion, on the other hand, by its very claim to know "The Truth" through "revelation," is inherently divisive and a creator of separatism and hostility. — Hermann Bondi

We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it; a definition by the method of measuring a quantity is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense ... — Hermann Bondi

All science is full of statements where you put your best face on your ignorance, where you say: ... we know awfully little about this, but more or less irrespective of the stuff we don't know about, we can make certain useful deductions. — Hermann Bondi

On the most usual assumption, the universe is homogeneous on the large scale, i.e. down to regions containing each an appreciable number of nebulae. The homogeneity assumption may then be put in the form: An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time. — Hermann Bondi

Our humanist attitude should therefore throughout be to stress what we all have in common with each other and relegate quarrelsome religion to the private domain where it can do [less] harm. — Hermann Bondi

Time is that which is manufactured by clocks. — Hermann Bondi

The landscape has been so totally changed, the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before ... It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook Isaac Newton has produced. — Hermann Bondi

The test of science is not whether you are reasonable - there would not be much of physics if that was the case - the test is whether it works. And the great point about Newton's theory of gravitation was that it worked, that you could actually say something about the motion of the moon without knowing very much about the constitution of the Earth. — Hermann Bondi

[Science doesn't deal with facts; indeed] fact is an emotion-loaded word for which there is little place in scientific debate. — Hermann Bondi

The scientist ... must always be prepared to deal with the unknown. It is an essential part of science that you should be able to describe matters in a way where you can say something without knowing everything. — Hermann Bondi

Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other. — Hermann Bondi

[Newton's calculations] entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it. — Hermann Bondi

What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, 'Oh, how ugly.' As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics. — Hermann Bondi