Optics

🇧🇷Isaac Newton

Mathematics

Enlightenment

1934–2014

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

William_Herschel

Science

1738–1822

"A knowledge of the construction of the heavens has always been the ultimate object of my observations..."

🇺🇸Willis Lamb

Science

1913–2008

"At the first of the 1960's Rochester Coherence Conferences, I suggested that a license be required for use of the word photon, and offered to give such license to properly qualified people."

🇺🇸Nicolaas Bloembergen

Science

1920–2017

"Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility."

Ptolemy

Science

"Ptolemy's Geography is the only book on cartography to have survived from the classical period and one of the most influential scientific works of all time."

🇫🇷Léon Foucault

Science

1819–1868

"Above all, we must be accurate, and it is an obligation which we intend to fulfil scrupulously."

William Rowan Hamilton

Science

1805–1865

"To admire is, to me, questionless, the highest pleasure of life."

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Science

1777–1855

"We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori."

🇩🇪Johannes Kepler

Science

1571–1630

"Harmonices mundi in fulltext facsimile at Carnegie-Mellon University"

🇨🇦Donna Strickland

Science

b. 1959

"If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think."

🇺🇸Edwin H. Land

Science

1909–1991

"You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components."