Quotes About Physics

physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.

The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.

Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'

Science may explain the world, but we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us

There is not a soul on Earth who can read the deluge of physics publications in its entirety. As a result, it is sad but true that physics has irretrievably fallen apart from a cohesive to a fragmented discipline. ... It was not that long ago that people were complaining about two cultures. If we only had it that good. today.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.

Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.

The laws of spiritual physics will not allow you to lead somebody that you don't love, that you don't care about, that you resent, that you look down on. That's why the Republicans can't lead black people. And that's why Democrats increasingly can't lead these straight, white, male demons that we hate so much.

In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.

Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.

There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected--so entirely novel--so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions--as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears.

Recent studies have considered the detection of a spaceship visiting our parish of the galaxy. In my opinion that last thought should bring a blush to every human cheek... Fecklessness might be the main theme of the aliens' report on the new-found source of radio pollution ... that emanates from beings who have mastered a lot of physics, chemistry and biology and yet let their children starve-while all around their planet the energy of their mother star runs to waste in a desert of space.

The whole is always more, is more capable of a much greater variety of wave states, than the combination of its parts. ... In this very radical sense, quantum physics supports the doctrine that the whole is more than the combination of its parts.

The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.

There were many stages to the Atlantean civilization. During the later stages, scientists became involved with advanced particle physics. In particular they were interested in reverse gravity fields.

There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.

I love to try to understand first principles and be guided by that. But then, enrich them, because they won't last forever, just like everybody thought Newton had all the answers. And you probably read that, in the last of the 19th century, Harvard and others were discouraging people from going into physics because we have all the answers. And right after that, of course - we have - all this stuff is thrown out the window. And now we have whole new answers.

One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.

At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.

Perhaps the earliest memories I have are of being a stubborn, determined child. Through the years my mother has told me that it was fortunate that I chose to do acceptable things, for if I had chosen otherwise no one could have deflected me from my path. ... The Chairman of the Physics Department, looking at this record, could only say 'That A- confirms that women do not do well at laboratory work'. But I was no longer a stubborn, determined child, but rather a stubborn, determined graduate student. The hard work and subtle discrimination were of no moment.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

How can you be a physics major and be shocked when you get pregnant from having sex?

Unless the structure of the nucleus has a surprise in store for us, the conclusion seems plain — there is nothing in the whole system of laws of physics that cannot be deduced unambiguously from epistemological considerations.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment... it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.

My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.

Politicians think that if matters look difficult, compromise is a good approach. Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise - they are what they are.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics - this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

That's absolutely correct and in addition to that life just isn't an accident of the laws of physics. There's a long list of experiments that suggest just the opposite.

Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.