Fermi Quotes

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." (Freeman Dyson)
When two identical He atoms collide... the interference is destructive. Particles that behave like He atoms are called fermions, short for "particles obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics." ...while bosons imitate one another... the "identity force" between fermions acts like a repulsion, and the probability of finding a fermion at some point in space is reduced if some of its identical siblings are nearby. ...It is the repulsive identity forces between electrons that support white dwarf stars... against their own gravity. View quote
Frank Wilczek
"It's so old,” she said, "that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.” Dead, thought MacAllister. That's what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there'd already been a few close calls. It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far. View quote
Jack McDevitt
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration... This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable-though much less certain-that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. View quote
Albert Einstein
There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg's and Schrödinger's equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions. View quote
David Kaiser