Physical Constants Quotes & Sayings

I feel like I am without substance, without weight. — Veronica Roth

You know how everyone - there's this maxim that we all become our mother or we all become our parents. And, generally, I really wouldn't mind becoming my mother. I really like her, so I wouldn't mind becoming her. But I definitely need to edit her. — Sarah Koenig

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals. — James C. Maxwell

Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible. — Arthur C. Clarke

DOCTOR: Oh. My, God! Oh, it's bigger!
RIVER: Well, yes.
DOCTOR: On the inside,
RIVER: We need to concentrate.
DOCTOR: Than it is
RIVER: I know where you're going with this, but I need you to calm down.
DOCTOR: On the outside!
RIVER: You've certainly grasped the essentials.
DOCTOR: My entire understanding of physical space has been transformed! Three-dimensional Euclidean geometry has been torn up, thrown in the air and snogged to death! My grasp of the universal constants of physical reality has been changed forever. — The Doctor

The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck.

He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately .... — Gerald Holton

Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. — Richard Dawkins

Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame. — Pearl S. Buck

Where there is love there is the nectar of life, the happiness. — Debasish Mridha

Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.

Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ...

To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples. — Jonathan Black

It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist. — Richard Dawkins

a conjurer will offer you alternatives to choose from but you always end up picking the one that he wants you to! — Ashwin Sanghi

Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal? — Jean Renoir

Sir 7:2 Depart from the unjust, and evils shall depart from thee. — Various

We can't be friends. I can't be friends with you, because I love you, and you've hurt me. — J. Lynn

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine! — George Gamow

If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do not need to know everything before we can know something. — John D. Barrow

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller's (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli's
mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher's stone of the mathematical universe.
This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung's collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy] — Todd Hayen

It seemed as though the main framework had been put together once and for all, and that little remained to be done but to measure physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal point. — William Cecil Dampier

I am a radical in thought (and principle) and a conservative in method (and conduct). — Rutherford B. Hayes

What several decades of research has revealed about Earth's location within the vastness of the cosmos can be summed up in this statement: the ideal place for any kind of life as we know it turns out to be a solar system like ours, within a galaxy like the Milky Way, within a supercluster of galaxies like the Virgo supercluster, within a super-supercluster like the Laniakea super-supercluser. In other words we happen to live in the best, perhaps the one and only, neighborhood that allows not only for physical life's existence but also for it's enduring survival. — Hugh Ross

I stepped away from the car preparing my own smile because you catch more flies with honey than you do with shit. — Bruce Blake

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century.

Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.

We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology. — Gerald Holton