Actually, that quotation is usually attributed to Ernest Rutherford. This is a common discussion among particle physicists, but of course Rutherford did his wo

Actually, that quotation is usually attributed to Ernest Rutherford. This is a common discussion among particle physicists, but of course Rutherford did his work before the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics became clear. For example, even measuring something like the mass of a particle is inherently probabilistic; for short-lived particles it's usually done by repeating an experiment many times, fitting a gaussian distribution to the decay times and backing the mass out from the time-energy uncertainty principle. See http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWModernScience.pdf http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWMode... for a really interesting discussion of the way things are headed from a statistician's perspective.