Edward Mills Purcell

“Life at low Reynolds number is very different. At very low Reynolds number, what you are doing is completely dominated by viscosity.”

“If you are at low Reynolds number, what you are doing is completely determined by the forces that are exerted on you at that moment, and by nothing in the past.”

“The unforgivable sin in science is to be dull.”

“It is one of the paradoxes of our time that the great triumphs of the human intellect, in the ordering of our experience of the physical world, have been used to fashion engines of destruction whose power may annul all the rest of man's history.”

“What you have to do is move in a way that is not reciprocal. You have to invent a stroke which, if you do it backwards, does not trace out its own path.”

“I have never been much of a joiner. I am not a very gregarious person and the joys of scientific camaraderie and gossip have always been a little beyond me.”

“We have detected radiation from interstellar hydrogen in the galaxy. The radiation is a spectral line at a frequency of 1420 megacycles.”