Ernest Rutherford - Collected Quotes

"The march of discovery has been so rapid that it has been difficult even for those directly engaged in the investigations to grasp at once the full significance of the facts that have been brought to light."(Ernest Rutherford, "Radioactive Transformations", 1906)

"It seems to me that you would have to assume that the electron knows beforehand where it is going to stop." (Ernest Rutherford, [Letter to Niels Bohr] 1913)

"Experiment without imagination or imagination without recourse to experiment, can accomplish little, but for effective progress, a happy blend of these two powers is necessary." (Ernest Rutherford, "The Electrical Structure of Matter", Science Vol. 58 (1499), 1923)

"[…] the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well-constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production." (Ernest Rutherford, 1932)

"Science is divided into two categories, physics and stamp-collecting." (Ernest Rutherford, "The Social Function of Science", 1939)

"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." (Ernest Rutherford [attributed by Albert Einstein])

"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." (Ernest Rutherford)

"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." (Ernest Rutherford)