"Ultimately, progress in applications is not deterministic, but opportunistic, exploiting for new applications whatever new science and technology happen to be coming along." (Herbert Kroemer, "Quasi-Electric Fields and Band Offsets: Teaching Electrons New Tricks" [Nobel lecture] 2000)
"Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the 'Butterfly Effect". Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own "Butterfly Effect'" (Kofi Annan, [Nobel lecture] 2001)
"The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher… Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate." (Peter Agre, [Nobel lecture] 2003)
"The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective." (Anthony James, [Nobel lecture] 2003)
"In many real-world situations, cooperation may be easier to sustain in a long-term relationship than in a single encounter. Analyses of short-run games are, thus, often too restrictive. Robert Aumann was the first to conduct a full-fledged formal analysis of so-called infinitely repeated games. His research identified exactly what outcomes can be upheld over time in long-run relations." (Robert Auman, [Nobel lecture] 2003)
"[...] the boundaries between chemistry, biology, physics and medicine are rapidly disappearing. Only a comprehensive understanding of the chemical and physical processes in our cells and organ systems will yield the insights needed to develop rational approaches to the prevention and treatment of disease." (Avram Hershko, [Nobel lecture] 2004)
“The universe has been expanding since the big bang, thus early on it was hot and dense. To trace the history of the universe we must understand the dynamics that operates when the universe was hot and particles were very energetic. Before the standard model we could not go back further than 200,000 years after the big bang. Today, especially since QCD simplifies at high energy, we can extrapolate to very eary times, where nucleons melt and quarks and gluons are liberated to form a quark-gluon plasma." (David Gross "The Discovery of Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD", [Nobel lecture] 2004)
"In many real-world situations, cooperation may be easier to sustain in a long-term relationship than in a single encounter. Analyses of short-run games are, thus, often too restrictive. Robert Aumann was the first to conduct a full-fledged formal analysis of so-called infinitely repeated games. His research identified exactly what outcomes can be upheld over time in long-run relations." (Robert Aumann, [Nobel lecture] 2005)
"I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general." (Robert Aumann, [Nobel lecture] 2005)
"Humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans." (Elinor Ostrom, [Nobel lecture] 2009)
"We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it." (Elinor Ostrom, [Nobel lecture] 2009)
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