Physicist And Their Quotes & Sayings

Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.'
'You're talking about something very different.'
'No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours? — Matt Haig

When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating. — Michio Kaku

I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true. — Ernest O. Lawrence

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion. — James P. Hogan

Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity - — Thomas Pynchon

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind. — David Gross

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them. — Eugene Paul Wigner

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality. — William S. Burroughs

The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction. — Sidney Coleman

A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all. — Robert Bunsen

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. — Carl Sagan

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.' — Charles Hard Townes

At least this is the way I see it. I am a physicist. I also consider myself a Christian. As I try to understand the nature of our universe in these two modes of thinking, I see many commonalities and crossovers between science and religion. It seems logical that in the long run the two will even converge. — Charles Hard Townes

Many scientists (the most notable being Albert Einstein) think in visual, spatial, and physical images rather than in mathematical terms and words. (N.B.: That the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, used an arboreal term to picture the cosmos [i.e., affirming that the universe "could have different branches,"] is a tribute to his [very visual] primate brain.) — David B. Givens

The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses. — Pierre Duhem

A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he said, surprised at the question, 'in honor of physics! — Annie Dillard

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr's solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time. — Richard E. Nisbett

Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist. — Guy Consolmagno

A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms. — George Wald

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are. — Confucius

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility. — Henry Adams

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe. — David Bohm

Who but a physicist, in the research lab or the corporation, could mix and match multiple ideas, models, technologies from different disciplines and thrive on change and new ideas ... ? — Robert Gibbs

The universe and the events in it are thus perfect examples to imitate. However, no matter how perfect the example is, everyone will draw and interpret objects according to their abilities. Charles Lako, commenting on aesthetics once said, that the magnificent scene at sunset would remind a farmer of the rather unaesthetic thought of dinner; the physicist, not of beauty or ugliness, but of the rightness or wrongness of the analysis of a matter. Thus, for Lalo, the sunset is beautiful only for those who are aware of beauty. Therefore, only those who see with God and hear with God can appreciate the beauty that spreads throughout existence as their senses are tuned to the spiritual realms. — M. Fethullah Gulen

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low. — Stephen Hawking

The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me. — Albert Einstein

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). — Edward Teller

When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist. — James Rothman

Later, at four in the morning, Myron encounters his eldest son, Sean, in the kitchen. They talk about schoolwork (Sean has an imminent exam), about what Sean would like to become (a physicist and a poet). "Medio tutissimus ibis," Sean's father says, and the son translates, "You will be safest in the middle." (All three boys know their Ovid.) Son and father regard each other, and Myron says, or perhaps merely thinks, the following: "My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I. . . . I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child's hand so gently against Leo's infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed. — Edith Pearlman

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers. — Diane Sawyer

He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Have you heard the joke about the chemist, physicist and economist who get wrecked on a desert isle, with a huge supply of canned baked beans as their only food? The chemist says that he can start a fire using the neighbouring palm trees, and calculate the temperature at which a can will explode. The physicist says that she can work out the trajectory of each of the baked beans, so that they can be collected and eaten. The economist says Hang on guys, you're doing it the hard way. Let's assume we have a can opener. — Steve Keen

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental. — George E.P. Box

Mankind has moved away from the heart of the world to the logic of the mind, and their belief is in the chemist, the physicist, and the mathematician. Science has proven to them that all this ancient belief in ceremony is simply ignorance. — Drunvalo Melchizedek

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions. — Fritjof Capra

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. — Algis Valiunas

The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within. — Fritjof Capra

Any thoughtful physicist, he said, well schooled in quantum mechanics, would agree that all time exists simultaneously, which I subsequently learned was the case. In truth, Father said, as the first instant of the universe, all of time was present, all our yesterdays and today and all our tomorrows, everyone and everything that was and ever would be existed at that moment. — Dean Koontz

My brother Carl became a physicist; I became an economist. — George Akerlof

Apparently, when people travel between dimensions, their physical forms are "no longer observable," which is a quantum mechanics thing, and explaining it involves this whole story about a cat that's in a box and is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box, and it gets seriously complicated. Never ask a physicist about that cat. — Claudia Gray

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick. — Rex Stout

The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential. — Jeff Lindsay

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true. — John Astin

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it. — Bill Bryson

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics. — Mario Livio

A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens. — George Stigler

Physics is much too hard for physicists. — David Hilbert

It is easy to time-travel, the physicist says - we do it every day. Travelling backward is the problem. — Rebecca Curtis

The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. — John Updike

There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it. — Frederick Soddy

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism. — Leonard Susskind

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol.

{Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres} — Charles H. Bennett

The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism. — Pierre Duhem

The first demonstration of the law of conservation of energy was not by a physicist but by a medical man. He demonstrated with rats. If you burn food you can find out how much heat is generated. If you then feed the same amount of food to rats it is converted, with oxygen, into carbon dioxide, in the same way as in burning. When you measure the energy in each case you find out that living creatures do exactly the same as non-living creatures. The law for conservation of energy is as true for life as for other phenomena. Incidentally, — Richard Feynman

Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself. Hence there is no reason why those things which may be learned from philosophical science, so far as they can be known by natural reason, may not also be taught us by another science so far as they fall within revelation. Hence theology included in sacred doctrine differs in kind from that theology which is part of philosophy. SECOND ARTICLE [I, Q. — Thomas Aquinas

For the man on the street, science and math sound too and soulless. It is hard to appreciate their significance Most of us are just aware of Newton's apple trivia and Einstein's famous e mc2. Science, like philosophy, remains obscure and detached, playing role in our daily lives. There is a general perception that science is hard to grasp and has direct relevance to what we do. After all, how often do we discuss Dante or Descartes over dinner anyway? Some feel it to be too academic and leave it to the intellectuals or scientists to sort out while others feel that such topics are good only for academic debate. The great physicist, Rutherford, once quipped that, "i you can't explain a complex theory to a bartender, the theory not worth it" Well, it could be easier said than done (applications of tools — Sharad Nalawade

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

The mathematical education of the young physicist [Albert Einstein] was not very solid, which I am in a good position to evaluate since he obtained it from me in Zurich some time ago. — Hermann Minkowski

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen. — David Gross

A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries, — Erwin Schrodinger

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane. — J.Williard Gibbs

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure. — Martin Rees

If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist. — Paul Krugman

Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who'd just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm. — Terry Pratchett

The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space. — Steven Rose