Helge Kragh > Quotes

“Alfvén dismissed in his address religion as a 'myth'...”
― Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology

“Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” Feynman is supposed to have said.”
― Helge Kragh, Simply Dirac

“Sommerfeld's fine-structure theory was generally considered to be excellently and unambiguously confirmed by experiment. Because the theory rested on the foundation provided by Bohr, the experiments were also taken as strong support for his theory of atomic structure.”
― Helge Kragh, Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom: The Bohr Model of Atomic Structure 1913-1925

“Following the path of earlier unificationists, one of Eddington's aims was to reduce the contingencies in the description of nature, for example, by explaining the fundamental constants of physics rather than accepting them as merely experimental data. One of these constants was the fine-structure constant ..., which entered prominently in Dirac's theory and was known to be about 1/137.”
― Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century