🏅Nobel Lectures (1920-1929)

"[...] generally speaking it is better, where possible in natural science, to study objects of research independently of the accidents of their historical development." (Walther Nernst,"Studies in Chemical Thermodynamics", [Nobel lecture] 1920) 

"As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our fellow men have become more and more satisfying as fish have taken up their work which has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane, knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries. Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime." (Frederick Soddy, [Nobel lecture] 1922)

"Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of science fi ction; but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighboring substances. In this event the whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star." (Francis W Aston,"Mass Spectra and Isotopes", [Nobel lecture] 1922) 

"Those whose lives are so filled with the romance of discovery, whose years are a holiday of exploration, do not need, do not deserve, payment for their toil. Their work itself is adequate reward, they have more happiness already than their share…" (Archibald V Hill, [Nobel lecture] 1922)

"A prominent literary writer recently spoke of the electron as 'only the latest scientific hypothesis which will in its turn give way to the abra-ca-da-bra of tomorrow." (Robert A Millikan, "The Electron and the Light-Quant from the Experimental Point of View", [Nobel lecture] 1923) 

"Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment." (Robert A Millikan, "The Electron and the Light-Quant from the Experimental Point of View", [Nobel Lecture] 1923)

"The fundamental laws of chemistry which are well known to you and which are laws of discontinuity (discontinuity between chemical species, and discontinuous variation according to the 'multiple proportions' in the composition of species made from the same simple bodies) then become immediately clear: they are imposed solely by the condition that the molecule constituting a compound contains a necessarily whole number of atoms of each of the simple bodies combined in this compound." (Jean-Baptiste Perrin, "Discontinuous Structure of Matter", [Nobel lecture] 1926)

"We are, finally, forced to think that each grain only follows the portion of liquid surrounding it, in the same way that an indicating buoy indicates and analyses the movement all the better if it is smaller: a float follows the movement of the sea more faithfully than a battleship. We obtain from this an essential property of what is called a liquid in equilibrium: its repose is only an illusion due to the imperfection of our senses, and what we call equilibrium is a certain well-defined permanent system of a perfectly irregular agitation. This is an experimental fact in which no hypothesis plays any part." ("Discontinuous Structure of Matter", [Nobel lecture] 1926)

"The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together." (Arthur Compton, [Nobel lecture] 1927) 

"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 regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast." (Charles Nicolle, "Investigations on Typhus", [Nobel lecture] 1928) 

"Any scientific problem must be attacked by research into detail; the natural scientist did not win his victories until he left meditation on the great riddles of the world and began a careful study of special problems; our knowledge - of more general associations and of far-reaching laws - has grown out of the results of such research." (Hans von Euler, "Fermentation of Sugars and Fermentative Enzymes", [Nobel lecture] 1929)