Newtonian Quotes & Sayings

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together. — Brian Greene

Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system. — George Gilder

As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. — Arthur Koestler

Use-values exist in the physical material world of things that can be described in Newtonian and Cartesian terms of absolute space and time. Exchange-values lie in the relative space-time of motion and exchange of commodities, while values can be understood only in terms of the relational space-time of the world market. (The immaterial relational value of socially necessary labor times comes into being within the evolving space-time of capitalist global development.) But as Marx has already convincingly shown, values cannot exist without exchange-values, and exchange cannot exist without use-values. The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another. — David Harvey

Student today don't mean na', but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs - in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla - a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. — Junot Diaz

Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink. — Michio Kaku

One of the most inefficient utopias I have ever seen was that of a humble Zapatista village in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. I kid you not, the entire village sits down and takes days to make a single decision! Everyone gets a chance to hear and be heard, and some questions take eons of time, but everyone is patient and respectful. Things actually get done. It's as if time was suddenly transformed from the tickling of a Newtonian clock to something that revolved around ordinary folks. — Curious George Brigade

Non-Newtonian calculi ... have considerable potential as alternative approaches to traditional problems. — Ivor Grattan-Guinness

The fact that we can describe the motions of the world using Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world. The fact that we do, does tell us something about the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Rain is the last thing you want when you're chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven't seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body. — Tim Dorsey

A gifted experimentalist, and theoretician, in the best Newtonian tradition ... His contributions to quantum measurements, and elucidative teachings on quantum mechanics, have not yet received the attention they deserve. — Willis Lamb

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed by
Newtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates. — Carl Sagan

Science ignores the spiritual realm because it is not amenable to scientific analysis. As importantly, the predictive success of Newtonian theory, emphasizing the primacy of a physical Universe, made the existence of spirit and God an extraneous hypothesis that offered no explanatory principles needed by science. — Bruce Lipton

Galileo essentially started out from where Archimedes left off, proceeding in the same direction as defined by his Greek predecessor. This is true not only of Galileo but also of the other great figures of the so-called "scientific revolution," such as Leibniz, Huygens, Fermat, Descartes, and Newton. All of them were Archimedes' children. With Newton, the science of the scientific revolution reached its perfection in a perfectly Archimedean form. Based on pure, elegant first principles and applying pure geometry, Newton deduced the rules governing the universe. All of later science is a consequence of the desire to generalize Newtonian, that is, Archimedean methods. — Reviel Netz

It was only later I began to think of bringing you to lie. It's forbidden, of course. To breathe life into machines. We've lost the knowledge anyway. Erased along with post-Newtonian physics. But the ancient methods...those cannot be rooted out. Alchemy. Sorcery. Clockwork magic. I thought there might be a way. — Sharon Lynn Fisher

Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies. — Jake Barton

The Prussian Academy of Sciences is a fast-track academic institute that requires a proactive, hands-on-type individual to overthrow the Newtonian conception of the universe. The successful candidate will have an excellent command of mass, energy, space, time and some maths. Bonus paid upon completion of proofs — Albert Einstein

Physicists abandoned their belief in a Newtonian, material universe because they had come to realize that the universe is not made of matter suspended in empty space but energy. — Bruce H. Lipton

Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively. — Oliver Heaviside

As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflective
about their activity do not instinctively ask the question 'Is it
reasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shape
rationality had to take. We have noted how 'unreasonable', in
classical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out to
be. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth-
seeking question takes the form, 'What makes you think that
might be the case? — John Polkinghorne

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs. — Stanislav Grof

There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing. — Terence McKenna

Woodrow Wilson later wrote: "The Constitution of the United States has been made under the dominion of the Newtonian theory. — Andrew Thomas

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. — John Shelby Spong

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic. — David Russell

The invisible government [bosses] is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it. — Walter Lippmann

Her other paramour was a student at the UASD
one of those City College types who's been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Students today don't mean na; but in Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the fall of Arbenz, by the stoning of Nixon, by the Guerillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs
in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of Guerilla
a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquemides was, therefore, a student, the son of a Zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn't a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959. — Junot Diaz

Newtonian physics is over. You don't act on the world to change the world. You realize the world is a projection of your inner self. If you change, the world changes. — Marianne Williamson

NEWTONIAN, Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when. — Ambrose Bierce

Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory. — Connie Willis

Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one physicist put it: Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability. — James Gleick

The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics. — Imre Lakatos

I am very excited about Quantum Forgiveness. The pioneers of quantum physics overturned and transcended Newtonian physics and the scientific method. Quantum physicists worked down to the smallest units and realized that everything they thought they knew about the world was not true. The world is about potentiality. In superposition, for example, things appear where we believe they will appear. And that is exciting because it is a science discovery that does not have to stay in the lab. It actually has everything to do with who we are. It is the gateway to our experience of being one with Source! — David Hoffmeister

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas. — Alfred North Whitehead

Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet. — Terence McKenna

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. — Thomas Pynchon

But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word. — Samuel Beckett

Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Elly Kleinman's Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes. — Marianne Williamson

In The Craft the clockwork God of Newtonian determinism has been replaced by the quantum-aware Great Architect who is ready and willing to allow us to contribute to His malleable Plan for the cosmos. — Robert Lomas

Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space. This means that it is absurd in general relativity to speak of a universe in which nothing happens. Time is nothing but a measure of change-it has no other meaning. Neither space nor time has any existence outside the system of evolving relationships that comprises the universe. Physicists refer to this feature of general relativity as background independence. By this we mean that there is no fixed background, or stage, that remains fixed for all time. In contrast, a theory such as Newtonian mechanics or electromagmetism is background dependent because it assumes that there exists a fixed, unchanging background that provides the ultimate answer to all questions about where and when. — Lee Smolin

This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form. — Neal Stephenson

Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. — Michael Chabon

I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics. — Neal Stephenson

There is a widespread belief about quantum mechanics, as also about relativity, that it is something that one is entitled to ignore for most ordinary philosophical and scientific purposes, since it only seriously applies at the micro level of reality; where 'micro' means something far smaller than would show up in any conventional microscope. What sits on top of this micro level, so the assumption runs, is a sufficiently good approximation of the old classical Newtonian picture to justify our continuing, as philosophers, to think about the world in essentially classical terms. I believe this to be a fundamental mistake. What I shall be arguing...is that the world is quantum-mechanical through and through; and that the classical picture of reality is, even at the microscopic level, deeply inadequate. — Stephen T. DeBerry

Our new understanding of energy, and hence energy healing, is full of ideas that seem strange and contradictory. The ability to understand that two competing concepts can exist at the same time is the key to being able to derive benefits from the new understanding of energy and the new science of energy healing. In the Newtonian world, matter and energy are separate and therefore don't influence each other. In the world of Einstein, they are intertwined and offer wonderful new possibilities that can benefit us all. But it is a world that many people have a hard time accepting. — Jed Diamond

The Far East and the Islamic world produced minds as intelligent and curious as those of Europe. However, between 1500 and 1950 they did not produce anything that comes even close to Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology. — Yuval Noah Harari

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. — Marshall McLuhan

the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture? — Bryant A. Meyers

The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness. — Stanislav Grof

Unlike determinism, fatalism does not proceed by contemplating the causal mechanics of the universe-the implications for human freedom of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. Instead, the fatalist argues that his doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the logic of propositions about the future. In simplified form, a version of the argument might run as follows: If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it's false, then it is the case that I won't. Either way, it's the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won't do now. — David Foster Wallace

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us. — Huston Smith

Thanks to the fact that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and invoking a bunch of Newtonian physics, you can deduce that our planet wobbles, too, taking roughly 26,000 years to trace out a small circle on the sky, a phenomenon known as precession. — Seth Shostak

A full explanation of this is beyond the scope of this book, suffice to say that Einstein was forced into this bold move primarily because Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism were incompatible with Newton's 200-year-old laws of motion. Einstein abandoned the Newtonian ideas of space and time as separate entities and merged them. In Einstein's theory there is a special speed built into the structure of spacetime itself that everyone must agree on, irrespective of how they are moving relative to each other. This special speed is a universal constant of nature that will always be measured as precisely 299,792,458 metres (983,571,503 feet) per second, at all times and all places in the Universe, no matter what they are doing. This — Brian Cox

One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge. — Peter Heather

Which one's in the main theater?"

"I don't know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons."

"Do you have any dice?" I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory not Newtonian. It didn't matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment and David was already in flight. — Connie Willis

The law of centrifugal force seems to be as true for the human condition as it is for the Newtonian mechanics. The faster our lives spin, the more things tend to fly apart. — Richard Paul Evans