Talk:Hannes Alfvén

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Hannes Alfven. --Antiquary 18:14, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

• "The appeal of the Big Bang has been more ideological than scientific. When men think about the universe, there is always a conflict between the mythical approach and the empirical scientific approach. In myth, one tries to deduce how the gods must have created the world - what perfect principles must have been used."

• "We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture."

• "I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs."

• "The difference between myth and science is the difference between divine inspiration of `unaided reason' on the one hand and theories developed in observational contact with the real world on the other. [It is] the difference between the belief in prophets and critical thinking, between Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd--Tertullian.] and De omnibus est dubitandum [Everything should be questioned--Descartes.]. To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly large regions of space and time is science."

• "To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science."

Quote of unknown provenance, but widely circulated

• "Gravitational systems are the ashes of prior electrical systems." This quote seems to have been pretty widely circulated and attributed to Hannes Alfvén (it's on several quote sites, too). Does anyone have a reference for where it came from? Speech, letter, book, article, paper, etc.? Would be interested to know the provenance. 50.53.86.212 00:34, 14 February 2016 (UTC)