I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity.
Interpretation
Physicists maintain a childlike curiosity about the universe, which fosters ongoing exploration and discovery.
Isidor Isaac Rabi compares physicists to Peter Pan, suggesting that their insatiable curiosity and desire to explore the mysteries of the universe allows them to retain a youthful spirit, regardless of age. This reflection emphasizes the importance of curiosity and wonder in scientific inquiry, highlighting that the pursuit of knowledge keeps the mind vibrant and engaged.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of curiosity in scientific advancements.
Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".
As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.
Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'
We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context-in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.
Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.
To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.
I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
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