Ivar Giaever

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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