Physicist Life Quotes & Sayings

Charles Darwin's only mistake was in not being a physicist, because the entire process of evolution started before our planet formed, with the event called the big bang, at this point our knowledge is such that I can hazard this further observation, all of the building blocks of life started at that moment, and that is how far we can back track this process of evolution. — Steve Merrick

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

Nature, too, seems to sense that something is coming to and end; it's summoning all it's strength for one last surge. — Melanie Raabe

The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by quantum theory, especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up. — Erwin Schrodinger

To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do. — Paul Davies

Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry. — Steven Weinberg

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. — Amiri Baraka

No country and no people can be free and ignorant at the same time. — Thomas Jefferson

He'd made her belong. Wrapped in his arms, Rose knew her life would never be the same again. — Barbara Elsborg

Thinking of the little creature dying in her — Nan Sweet

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

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. — Albert Einstein

She who weeps when the sun's in sky, Will never pile the platter high. — Margaret Atwood

Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. — Harold Lewis

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. — Carl Sagan

When I was younger, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist - he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. — Jeremy Gilley

Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance. — Luther Burbank

I'd never given much too thought to how I would die- though I'd had reason enough in the last few months- but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this. — Stephenie Meyer

On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story. — Simon Conway Morris

Without perceiving things through the old filter of past conditioning and conceptualization, one can sense the universe is intensely alive. Even so-called inanimate objects - I often pick up little objects and just look at them and sense that they are alive. Physicists actually confirm that what we perceive as dead matter is not dead at all. Everything is an intensely alive energy field. That aliveness is only an aspect of the aliveness or life that I am. — Eckhart Tolle

I'm a student of patterns. At heart, I'm a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything. — Will Smith

I've learned that in many cases, change is not a function of life's cruelty but instead a function of God's graciousness. — Shauna Niequist

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

Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human ... Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments. — Robert Rosenberg

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it. — Carla H. Krueger

Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician. — Arthur Eddington

And back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people." Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusiasm of the market, Newton jumped back in at a much higher price - and lost £20,000 (or more than $3 million in today's money). For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words "South Sea" in his presence. 4 — Benjamin Graham

As former physicist Al Slawsky put it in the early 1990s, "It was a bad year for value investing. In my former life, there was never a 'bad year' for gravity. — Richard R. Lindsey

By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life. — John Ellis

A. Douglas Stone, a physicist who has spent his life using quantum mechanics to explore striking new phenomena, has turned his considerable writing skills to thinking about Einstein and the quantum. What he finds and makes broadly understandable are the riches of Einstein's thinking not about relativity, not about his arguments with Bohr, but about Einstein's deep insights into the quantum world, insights that Stone shows speak to us now with all the vividness and depth they had a century ago. This is a fascinating book, lively, engaging, and strong in physical intuition. — Peter Galison

Stunt dwarf or destroy the imagination of a child and you have taken away its chances of success in life. Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old. — L. Frank Baum

My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really. — Jeremy Northam

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

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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