Charles H. Townes

“We can't avoid age. However, we can avoid some aging. Continue to do things. Be active. Life is fantastic in the way it adjusts to demands; if you use your muscles and mind, they stay there much longer.”

“Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don't know what's there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.”

“I knew I wanted to be a scientist. Which kind of scientist was the question.”

“It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.”

“I was brought up as Christian, and while my ideas have changed, I have always felt myself religiously oriented.”

“The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.”

“I was very eager to produce an oscillator for short waves. I was doing science with microwaves, and I would get down to a few millimetres in wavelength, but I wanted to get shorter wavelengths; I wanted to get into the infra-red because I saw there was a lot more to be done there.”

“The imposing edifice of science provides a challenging view of what can be achieved by the accumulation of many small efforts in a steady objective and dedicated search for truth.”

“Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.”

“Alfred Nobel really understood very well the necessary supra-natural character of the human enterprise.”

“In many cases, people who win a Nobel prize, their work slows down after that because of the distractions. Yes, fame is rewarding, but it's a pity if it keeps you from doing the work you are good at.”

“Science has faith. We make postulates. We can't prove those postulates, but we have faith in them.”

“One of the things my family taught me - I think very important in religion and science - is that you must be ready to stand up for what you think. Decide what you really think is best, and stick with it.”

“There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.”

“I don't think that science is complete at all. We don't understand everything, and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand.”