Physical Laws Quotes & Sayings

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws. — Charles De Secondat

In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space. — George Gilder

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form. — John Archibald Wheeler

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws. — Leonard Mlodinow

Its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds; — Edward Feser

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. — John Stuart Mill

The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don't become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does. — P. J. O'Rourke

Sergei remembered well how unsettled Nikishin had been by the arm and leg that day. Then, it had made him sneer inwardly, but it was difficult to maintain that derision since he began to like the man. Trust him even. And that could be dangerous enough, laws being what they were, Nikishin being who he was. Never mind that any normal individual would be revolted by Sergei's current physical state, and justifiably so. Cyborg patchwork over mangled flesh. The pinnacle of attractive. He'd always been different, a freak. Now it was just visible. Impossible to hide. — Aleksandr Voinov

Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams. — Gregory Maguire

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. — Carl Sagan

At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some "respectable" scientists regard as possible. — Kip S. Thorne

Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws. — Tsung-Dao Lee

The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation. — Paul Dirac

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. — Bill Bryson

Combining in our survey then, the whole range of deposits from the most recent to the most ancient group, how striking a succession do they present:- so various yet so uniform-so vast yet so connected. In thus tracing back to the most remote periods in the physical history of our continents, one system of operations, as the means by which many complex formations have been successively produced, the mind becomes impressed with the singleness of nature's laws; and in this respect, at least, geology is hardly inferior in simplicity to astronomy. — Roderick Murchison

I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling of physical uneasiness which amounts to suffering. Were mankind reduced to the necessity of choosing between two parties, one of whom injures his interest, and the other his conscience, we should have nothing to hope from the future. Happily, this is not the case; and to see Aristus regain his economical superiority, as well as his moral superiority, it is sufficient to understand this consoling maxim, which is no less true from having a paradoxical appearance, "To save is to spend. — Frederic Bastiat

The physical laws, in their observable consequences, have a finite limit of precision. — Kurt Godel

The principle of conservation of boson number inside a system is seen to follow directly from the Abstraction Model. The IBMs are seen to obey the Laws of Physical Transaction that follows from Zero-Postulation. The chaotic superfields at the requisite scaling-ratio yields necessary equation-parameters needed to describe them at that given scaling-ratio. This is seen to be independent of the choice of scale, but at smaller scaling-ratios, we have less loss of information. At a higher scale, we seem to have less number of parameters required to describe them. — Subhajit Ganguly

She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying. — Joanne Greenberg

It is unlikely that someone could proclaim "truths" that are counter to physical laws for very long (for example, that it is healthy for children to run around in bathing suits in winter and in fur coats in summer) without appearing ridiculous. But it is perfectly normal to speak of the necessity of striking and humiliating children and robbing them of their autonomy, at the same time using such high-sounding words as chastising, upbringing, and guiding onto the right path. — Alice Miller

God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, which correspond to the physical element in us, do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond. — James Martineau

is a power lurking in all of us, an emotional energy that can be used to move objects and manipulate matter. But it doesn't follow any physical laws that we can, as yet, understand; it exists only in our hearts and minds. — Jasper Fforde

The purpose of man's creation is that he do good in the world, not substitute
himself for God and think that he can make and unmake the moral law at his own
convenience and for his own selfish and narrow ends. This is the difference between
physical laws and the moral law - the one is to be used and put to service; the other
must be obeyed and served. For God says — Fazlur Rahman

Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people. A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. I had ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa was plain, he asserted I couldn't see the whipped cream because it sank to the bottom. Since whipped cream has a very low density and floats on all liquids that humans consume, I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant. Unconvinced, he brought over a dollop of whipped cream to test for himself. After bobbing once or twice in my cup, the whipped cream sat up straight and afloat. What better proof do you need of the universality of physical laws? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn, the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so, when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look for it. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race", imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws. This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I tell you about a fact and truth. In physical reality of matter,
there's no such thing as an imaginary spirit nor spiritual ghost.
They are also made of matter, but totally different in size and
laws of physics which rule their life and the way they interact. — Toba Beta

A real magician makes no claim to violate physical laws; he only appears to do so. However, when pseudoscientists make claims to discover dramatic new phenomena, going beyond current physical theory, like telepathy or mental metal bending, then, like children, we must insist on seeing how the trick is done or as adults sit back and enjoy the entertainment. As — Heinz R. Pagels

Paranormal phenomena are only a
collection of abilities that challenge known science.Physical laws
don't explained them. You have to go beyond the limits of traditional
categories to make any sense of them.
Beau Walker--The SHIVA Syndrome — Alan Joshua

From this perspective, the universe can be thought of as an information processor. It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and the now after that. Our senses become aware of such processing by detecting how the physical environment changes over time. But the physical environment itself is emergent; it arises from the fundamental ingredient, information, and evolves according to the fundamental rules, the laws of physics. — Brian Greene

Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed. They are no exceptions to the rule that God always geometrizes. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science. — D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

She used her heart to love him, not her head, not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself. — Charles Yu

Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor. — Terence McKenna

The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road. — Vladimir Nabokov

You cannot control faeries. Can. Not. They aren't logical or rational. They don't obey the same laws (physical, social, emotional, traffic - you name it) that we do. — Kiersten White

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future. — Max Planck

If you really want to contribute to our theoretical understanding of physical laws - and it is an exciting experience if you succeed! - there are many things you need to know. First of all, be serious about it! — Gerard 't Hooft

The universe and the Laws of Physics seem to have been specifically designed for us. If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist: Either atoms would not be stable, or they wouldn't combine into molecules, or the stars wouldn't form heavier elements, or the universe would collapse before life could develop, and so on ... — Stephen Hawking

Of course you cannot free yourself from the laws of nature; but the laws of nervous systems are not the same as the physical laws. — Mario Bunge

I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than either the person I was or whatever I am now. — John Green

Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order. — William A. Dembski

The remarkable thing was that everyone accepted the entire process, seemingly as normal as physical laws of nature, despite the fact that it was really as ethereal as a rainbow. The money did not physically exist. Even "real" money was only specially made paper printed with black ink on the front and green on the back. What backed the money was not gold or something of intrinsic value, but rather the collective belief that money had value because it had to have such value. — Tom Clancy

The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Christian message does not begin with "accept Christ as your Savior"; it begins with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". The Bible teaches that God is the sole source of the entire created order. No other gods compare with Him; no natural forces exist on their own; nothing receives its nature or existence from another source. Thus, His Word, or laws, or creation ordinances give the world its order and structure. God's creative world is the source of the laws of physical nature (natural sciences), human nature (ethics, politics, economics, aesthetics) and even logic. That's why Psalm 119:91 says, "all things are your servants". There is no philosophically or spiritually neutral subject matter. — Nancy Pearcey

Our experience teaches us that there are indeed laws of nature, regularities in the way things behave, and that these laws are best expressed using the language of mathematics. This raises the interesting possibility that mathematical consistency might be used to guide us, along with experimental observation, to the laws that describe physical reality, and this has proved to be the case time and again throughout the history of science. We will see this happen during the course of this book, and it is truly one of the wonderful mysteries of our universe that it should be so. — Brian Cox

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order. — Jean Piaget

For, despite all our vague talk of ancient or medieval "science," pagan, Muslim, or Christian, what we mean today by science - its methods, its controls and guiding principles, its desire to unite theory to empirical discovery, its trust in a unified set of physical laws, and so on - came into existence, for whatever reasons, and for better or worse, only within Christendom, and under the hands of believing Christians. — David Bentley Hart

It's a bit like staring into another dimension, one that has a different set of mathematical and physical laws. For me, it also serves as reminder that that the mind of God is unknowable, that things that seem contradictory to us only appear so because we have no context for them, or aren't seeing the full picture. — Anna Jarzab

The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour. — Victor J. Stenger

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now. — Sten F. Odenwald

Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher. — Charles Kettering

The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. — Albert A. Michelson

The laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are, however, not solely of importance in pure science. They necessarily come first in order ... in the whole record of human experience, and they control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race. — Frederick Soddy

The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws. — Marcel Duchamp

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation. — John Yoo

Physical laws are ruled by logic, and are ungovernable: so when the die comes to rest on its edge, it owes neither apology nor account. — John Hadac

If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics. — Pierre Duhem

If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures? — Martin Gardner

If edges of galaxies do not conform to physical laws we discard the laws not the edges. — Arpine Konyalian Grenier

Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral. — Catharine Beecher

The physical laws are but the bars of a cage. — Gregory Benford

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

There are principles that govern human effectiveness - natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably there as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension. — Stephen Covey

As we look into these things we get an aesthetic pleasure from them directly on observation. There is also a rhythm and a pattern between the phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye, but only to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns which we call Physical Laws. — Anonymous

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. — Simone Weil

Scientists explore the physical world for REPRODUCIBLE PATTERNS, which they represent by MODELS and organize into THEORIES according to LAWS. — David Hestenes

All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multicolored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion. There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the furthest limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck. — Douglas Adams

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Children should be introduced right from the start to the potentialities of their environment, to the physical and psychological laws that govern the visual world, and to the supreme enjoyment that comes from participating in the creative process of giving form to one's living space. — Walter Gropius

Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute, and he knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher laws - to the strength of the spirit. — Mahatma Gandhi

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws
hygeine [sic] of the body, and hygeine of the spirit
is the surest warrant for health and happiness. — Harriot Kezia Hunt

Science affects all our ways of thinking about the world: both the physical world, which, if I may make so bold, is easy to understand because it is regular and follows simple laws, and also the social world, which is more baffling and less predictable. — Arthur Lewis

Children need to be exploring their physical world. They need to be learning the fundamental laws of physics by manipulating objects. — David Perlmutter

When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness. — Eugene Wigner

The scientific revolution proved that there are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance. You don't exactly have faith in the law of gravity so much as you just know that the law is the law. Now we are learning that there are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena. These two sets of laws are parallel. Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce oxygen, which we need in order to breathe. Internally the universe also supports our survival. Emotionally and psychologically the internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. And human relationships exist to produce love. — Marianne Williamson

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. — Flannery O'Connor

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.' — Camille Paglia

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes. — Barry Lopez

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer. — Paul Davies

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted. — Michael Crichton

In seeming contradiction of physical laws, time is heavy only when it is empty. — Trevanian

The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables-either particular facts or relative frequencies of events. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. — Nathan Myhrvold

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass, she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?
Eternal evolution and struggle ... As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! — Leo Tolstoy

It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws. We will soon wear you down by pure capacity to suffer. — Martin Luther

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation. — Rudy Rucker

Professor Weyl,* the mathematician, gave an excellent definition of symmetry, which is that a thing is symmetrical if there is something that you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it it looks the same as it did before. That is the sense in which we say that the laws of physics are symmetrical; that there are things we can do to the physical laws, or to our way of representing the physical laws, which make no difference, and leave everything unchanged in its effects. It is this aspect of physical laws that is going to concern us in this lecture. — Richard Feynman

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

In microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner. — M.L. Von Franz

Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to. — Sherry Turkle

From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any "new force" or what not, directing the behavior of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. — Erwin Schrodinger

There are spiritual and physical laws to obey if we are to be happy. — Boyd K. Packer

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero. — Subhajit Ganguly

She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena. — George MacDonald

The facts of physics do not oblige us to accept one philosophy rather than the other...the laws of physics in any one reference frame account for all physical phenomena, including the observations of moving observers. And it is often simplest to work in a single frame, rather than to hurry after each moving object in turn...You can pretend that whatever inertial frame you have chosen is the ether of the 19th century physicists, and in that frame you can confidently apply the ideas of the FitzGerald contraction....It is a great pity that students don't understand this. Very often they are led to believe that Einstein somehow swept away all that went before. This is not true. Much of what went before survived the theory of relativity, with the added freedom that you can choose any inertial frame of reference in which to apply all those ideas. — John S. Bell

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind's eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is ... teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. — Brand Blanshard

Great faith overcomes laws of nature that govern physical world. — Toba Beta

Outward, thanks to the knowledge of physical laws, man could subdue (or subjugate ... ) nature, but inwardly, he remained a slave to it. For, when all is said and done, at what is aiming all this display (or deployment) of activity, if not to realized outward profits, to provide material pleasure (or enjoyment). It is not the first time that men sell their birth right for a dish of lentils, and thus disown (or repudiate or deny) the best of thmeselves. — African Spir