Ernest Rutherford

When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.

As quoted in The Wit and Wisdom of the 20th Century : A Dictionary of Quotations‎ (1987) by Frank S. Pepper, p. 226 , 1987

It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.

As quoted in The Birth of a New Physics (1959) by I. Bernard Cohen , 1959

I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.

As quoted by Richard Reeves, A Force of Nature The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (2008) citing Ernest Rutherford Atom Man , 2008

The first point that arises is the atom. I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in colour, according to taste. In order to explain the facts, however, the atom cannot be regarded as a sphere of material, but rather as a sort of wave motion of a peculiar kind. The theory of wave-mechanics, however bizarre it may appear... has the astonishing virtue that it works, and works in detail, so that it is now possible to understand and explain things which looked almost impossible in earlier days. One of the problems encountered is the relation between the electron, an atom and the radiation produced by them jointly; the new mechanics states the type of radiation emitted with correct numerical relations. When applied to the periodic table, a competent and laborious mathematician can predict the periodic law from first principles.

A. S. Eve, Rutherford (2013) , 2013

I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist.

On his 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry, as quoted in Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics (2004) by Mauro Dardo, p. 69 , 2004