Hannes Alfvén quotes

Hannes Alfvén was a Swedish physicist and electrical engineer, renowned for his pioneering work in plasma physics. His discoveries laid the foundations for the field of magnetohydrodynamics, greatly contributing to our understanding of cosmic plasmas. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking research. Here are 14 of his quotes:

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe ... every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.

Hannes Alfvén

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

Hannes Alfvén

Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of astrophysicists who have gotten their main knowledge from these textbooks. Earthbound and space telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory.

Hannes Alfvén

I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation.

Hannes Alfvén

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

Hannes Alfvén

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.

Hannes Alfvén

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.

Hannes Alfvén

The peer review system is satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a revolution in a discipline such as astrophysics, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo.

Hannes Alfvén

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

Hannes Alfvén

Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research.

Hannes Alfvén

Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory.

Hannes Alfvén

The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.

Hannes Alfvén