Quotes by Hannes Alfven

About Hannes Alfven:

Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 Alfven

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 Alfven

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 Alfven

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

Hannes Alfven

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 Alfven

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 Alfven

Author Bio

  • NameHannes Alfven
  • DescriptionSwedish electrical engineer and plasma physicist
  • AliasesHannes Olof Gösta Alfvén
  • BornMay 30, 1908
  • DiedApril 2, 1995
  • CountrySweden
  • ProfessionPhysicist; Astronomer; Astrophysicist; Engineer
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Physics; Polhem Prize