Hermann Bondi famous quotes

03-25-2025

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

#Ignorance #Knowledge #Littles
Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.
-- Hermann Bondi

#Human Nature #Characteristics #Humans
If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19Â½ 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

#Creativity #Science #Persistence
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

#Education #Children #Science
Time is that which is manufactured by clocks.
-- Hermann Bondi

#Clock
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

#Attitude #Stress #Common
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

#Talking #Way #Measurement
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

#Moving #Nebula #Experiments
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

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

#Science #Littles #Facts
[Newton's calculations] entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.
-- Hermann Bondi

#Knowledge #Science #Knowing
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

#Moving #Science #Numbers

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