Isidor Isaac Rabi

I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.

Isidor Isaac Rabi (July 29, 1898 – January 11, 1988) was a Galician-born physicist, and Nobel laureate.

Quotes

• My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.
  • As quoted in "Great Minds Start With Questions" in Parents Magazine (September 1993)

• I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.
  • As quoted in "The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder and the Bomb" by Mark Fiege in Enviornmental History, Vol. 12, Issue 3 (July 2007)

• What more do you want, mermaids?
  • In defense of Robert Oppenheimer at McCarthy-era security hearings, after noting he had organized scientists to develop the atomic bomb for the US, as quoted in "Atomised" in The New Statesman' (10 January 2008)