Quotes & Sayings About Physics Education

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong. — Noam Chomsky

Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture. — Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education. — David Christian

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing. — Linus Pauling

Certainly by the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I had to have a long education if I wanted to become an astronomer, but I figured I'd try it, and if I didn't get far enough, I could always end up teaching in high school or math or physics. — Nancy Roman

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation's good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition - recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us. It would be strange and self-defeating to fail to seek out these wise voices from the past
as self-defeating as it would be to attempt to rediscover the principles of physics from scratch or invent a new method of brain surgery without having learned the ones that already exist. — George Saunders

That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears. — Anthony Lane

When you read about chemistry and physics, you want to do them too. — Robert A. Heinlein

The non-scientist in the street probably has a clearer notion of physics, chemistry and biology than of statistics, regarding statisticians as numerical philatelists, mere collector of numbers. — Stephen Senn

As Gove knows ... 'Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.' — George Orwell

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God. — Isaac Newton

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers ... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness ... — Alain De Botton

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day.
[Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.] — Richard Rhodes

When Mathematics unfold through Origamis,
when video games target Medicine and Education,
when architecture embraces nature,
when we defy gravity,
when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein,
when we stop playing war,
when TV starts saying something,
when we produce without wasting,
when engineering meets humanity's primary needs,
when all of these are not just casualties,
but a standard we all live UP to:
Then we'll know.
I'll know:
we really live in the 21st century — Natasha Tsakos

Einstein's discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences.9 The most important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding and knowledge of theoretical physics. He was also helped by his ability to visualize thought experiments, which had been encouraged by his education in Aarau. Also, there was his grounding in philosophy: from Hume and Mach he had developed a skepticism about things that could not be observed. And this skepticism was enhanced by his innate rebellious tendency to question authority. — Walter Isaacson

Implicit in the notion of such education as it is practiced in the United States is the concept of breadth. You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don't just learn to think; you learn that there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature. You see what philosophy means by reality, and then you see what math or physics does. Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself. — William Deresiewicz

It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested.[ — H.W. Brands

We the undersigned, intend to establish an instruction and training institution which differs from the common elementary schools principally in that it will embrace, outside of (in addition to) the general and elementary curriculum, all branches of the classical high school, which are necessary for a true Christian and scientific education, such as: Religion, the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and English languages; History, Geography, Mathematics, Physics, natural history, Introduction to Philosophy, Music, and Drawing. — C.F.W. Walther

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line. — Bill Gaede

I gave my change to him," says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall. "You know he'll only spend it on schnapps," Ove states. Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. "Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics! — Fredrik Backman

Fascinated by history during my secondary education, then by physics and mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique, I finally entered the national administration of mines in 1936. — Maurice Allais

I was not an especially diligent student but nevertheless obtained a reasonable education in physics. — Robert Coleman Richardson

Take a child & teach him physics his first 7 grades of education, I submit he'd excel to a savant-like level. Imagine adult focus for 7 yrs. — Ace Antonio Hall

Physics, Chemistry, and Biology had been replaced by Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture, because of Chairman Mao's instruction to "combine education with practical experience. — Ji-li Jiang

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. — James Gleick

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but can enjoy and participate in many scientific discoveries which as constantly made. Such participation was quite common in the 19th century, but has unhappily declined. Literacy in science will enrich a person's life. — Hans Bethe

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. — Ernst F. Schumacher