Ivar Giaever Quotes

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

- Ivar Giaever

You need to be curious, competitive, creative, stubborn, self-confident, skeptical, patient and be lucky to win a Nobel.

- Ivar Giaever

There are just two things you can do to win a Nobel prize - have a good idea and pursue it effectively.

- Ivar Giaever

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

- Ivar Giaever

While classical mechanics correctly predicts the behavior of large objects such as tennis balls, to predict the behavior of small objects such as electrons, we must use quantum mechanics.

- Ivar Giaever

Understanding truth is the primary objective of science, not doing good for the world.

- Ivar Giaever

If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.

- Ivar Giaever

I don't really know what the future of science is. Maybe we have come to the end of science; maybe science is a finite field. The inventions resulting from this finite field, however, are boundless.

- Ivar Giaever

My own beliefs are that the road to a scientific discovery is seldom direct and that it does not necessarily require great expertise. In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.

- Ivar Giaever

When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists.

- Ivar Giaever

'Incontrovertible' is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

- Ivar Giaever

There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics.

- Ivar Giaever

Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money.

- Ivar Giaever

If you want to help Africa, you should help them out of poverty, not try to build solar cells and windmills.

- Ivar Giaever

I would say that, basically, global warming is a non-problem.

- Ivar Giaever