What Is Physics Quotes & Sayings

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

In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels. — Scarlett Thomas

Perhaps,thought Felix,that's what magic is
physics with a different twist to it.
my world just hasn't discovered the twist. — Elizabeth Kay

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for. — Hans Christian Von Baeyer

It is shameful that there are so few women in science ... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine. — Chien-Shiung Wu

Look, if you're going to insist that I've taught you something, I guess I should give you a final exam." "Really?" "One question." "Sure." "Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom, okay? Don't just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means." "Okay." "And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?" "Does it make my heart flutter?" "Yes or no. It's a yes or no question. No equations allowed." "All right, I'll let you know." "Don't be dense. I don't need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it's not the answer that counts, it's what you do with the information." We locked eyes. His younger face flashed in my mind. The energetic, smiling bongo drum player I had seen pictured in the front of his book, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. A question popped from my lips. — Anonymous

What really matters for me is ... the more active role of the observer in quantum physics ... According to quantum physics the observer has indeed a new relation to the physical events around him in comparison with the classical observer, who is merely a spectator. — Wolfgang Pauli

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

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom. — Terence McKenna

Look you wanna know the truth? I don't really care about the
stats or the cup or the trophy or anything like that. In fact even the games aren't that important to me. What matters to me is the perfect throw, making the perfect catch, the perfect step and block. Perfection. That's what it's about. It's those moments. When you can feel the perfection of creation. The beauty the physics you know the wonder of mathematics. The elations of action and reaction and that is the kind of perfection that I want to be connected to. — Samuel Anders

The kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they're twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that's what the kids want to do, these days. — Michael Crichton

When I was little, my friends would get so excited when I told them that my parents did most of their scientific work at home, and they'd come in for the first time looking around for bubbling beakers or dynamos or whatever devices sci-fi shows had taught them to expect. What it mostly means is papers piled on every flat surface. Sure, lately we've had a few gadgets, but only a few. Nobody wants to hear that theoretical physics has less to do with shiny lasery stuff and more to do with numbers. — Claudia Gray

Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works. — Richard Feynman

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. — Jerry A. Coyne

You create reality by looking at it, is what Quantum Mechanics suggests. This may sound outrageously magical. Quantum Mechanics or QM, is the physics of the microscopic world. It is a strange theory that took birth in the early 20th century and continues to dazzle scientists and philosophers today. So much so, that QM is regarded as the gateway to the world of consciousness, bringing science and spiritualty together. Science has entered domain of philosophy and consciousness/spirituality through Quantum Mechanics, making it a hot topic for debate among intellectuals from both scientific and philosophical domains. Some physicists even insist on making philosophy of physics! — Sharad Nalawade

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. — Ken Burns

My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It's the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It's when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved. — Zia Haider Rahman

The lovely paradox of willing compliance with what an ancient prophet called "the great plan of happiness," is that conformity to law breeds both freedom and individualism. We may think a leaping child, in the euphoria of his imagination, enjoys unfettered freedom when he tells us he is going to land on the moon. But the rocket scientist hard at work in the laboratory, enmeshed in formulae and equations she has labored to master, and slaving away in perfect conformity with the laws of physics, is the one with true freedom: for she will land on the moon; the boy will not. — Terryl L. Givens

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants. — Richard P. Feynman

After reading the salary, I've decided that I must refuse. The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I've always wanted to do- -get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things.. With the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would happen to me. I'd worry about her, what she's doing; I'd get into arguments when I come home, and so on. All this bother would make me uncomfortable and unhappy. I wouldn't be able to do physics well, and it would be a big mess! What I've always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I've decided that I can't accept your offer. — Richard Feynman

The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. — Robert M. Pirsig

We all start from "naive realism," i.e., the doctrine that things
are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones
are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the
greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of
snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and
the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but
something very different — Bertrand Russell

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing. — Stephen Greenblatt

When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry. — Freeman Dyson

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um ... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I am coming. I can't be coming. I'm fighting it, and that's making it worse. I am trying to fake not having an orgasm. I wonder if he can tell ...
I feel a little sick to my stomach when I realize exactly what sensation has brought me to this unfortunate climax: the friction of a very fat man's matted belly hair on my clit. This man I am on top of is the most repulsive person I've ever allowed to touch me. Sheer physics won't allow him to be on top of me. In fact, I am not entirely sure how it is that he will get back up from his supine position.
This man is my john. This orgasm and the wave of revulsion that follows quickly on its heels and makes my skin turn cold makes him my last client in my short career as an escort. — Audacia Ray

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation. — Steven Weinberg

Numbers, furthermore as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future. — Michio Kaku

It turned out that Evgeny Evgenievich indeed had a clever plan how to convert me to math. As soon as I came to his office, he asked me, "So, I hear you like quantum physics. Have you heard about Gell-Mann's eightfold way and the quark model?" "Yes, I've read about this in several popular books." "But do you know what was the basis for this model? How did he come up with these ideas?" "Well ... " "Have you heard about the group SU(3)?" "SU what?" "How can you possibly understand the quark model if you don't know what the group SU(3) is? — Edward Frenkel

Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science - how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here. — Pierce Brown

We have to create miracles. A miracle is not the intersession of an external divine agency in violation of the laws of physics. A miracle is simply something that is impossible from an old story but possible from within a new one. It is an expansion of what is possible. — Charles Eisenstein

What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal. — Werner Heisenberg

What Einstein demonstrated in physics is equally true of all other aspects of the cosmos: all reality is relative. Each reality is true only within given limits. It is only one possible version of the way things are. There are always multiple versions of reality. To awaken from any single reality is to recognize its relative nature. Meditation is a device to do just that. — Ram Dass

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth. — Richard Feynman

Cloak, how many laws of physics did we just break?" I asked, stunned by what had just happened. "You can't break the laws of physics. Whenever you seem to violate one, it only means your understanding of them is incomplete. To answer your question, though, three hundred and forty-seven." "I thought so." I was amazed at the power — C.T. Phipps

I'm not a geius guy, even and Albert Einstein isn't and Tesla, nobody is genius. From where you will know what's the IQ for Albert or Tesla in their time there wasn't such test and how such test can show how clever are you in case that the most questions are math, physics and mainly this how this two subjects will show that you are clever or dumb?? I strongly doubt about this if I know the answer sof the test and I fill it right so I must be the world clever man? No, I don't think so - That's bullshit!
That I have written 8 books and now I'm working on some other books this doesn't make me clever, the most stuff are just search from the internet and put, the other is thoughts from me. Like thinking on some questions and that's all! — Deyth Banger

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical. — Bruce H. Lipton

I've always been fascinated by science - anatomy, quantum physics, space and time theory. I don't understand these things, but the mystery is a part of what attracts me to them. That the world I live in now is complex beyond my understanding only encourages me to believe that there are wild possibilities in creation beyond even the things of this dimension of time and space. If this universe has alternate dimensions outside of our understanding, isn't it possible that we might exist in a life beyond this one, in another kind of dimension that is fuller and more alive than the one we know? — Bethany Pierce

What if our souls are connected to each other and flow together in and out of time like a giant woven tapestry? What if it was that simple and that real? The laws of physics state that energy cannot be destroyed, and we are made of energy. When each of us dies, that energy reenters the atmosphere. What if it does become part of the collective blanket of souls? Threads of energy that connect us to each other. What if it is our obligation to follow them, despite the knots and tangles, through to the end? — M.J. Rose

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it. — Tom Hanks

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations. — Neil Turok

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. — Robert Lanza

Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject. — Harold Morowitz

Quantum physics is teaching us that particles themselves don't create particles. It's what Jesus said 2,000 years ago, that it's the Spirit that gives life and that you don't get particles from more particles. — Wayne Dyer

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. — Heinz R. Pagels

As science has become more abstract and remote from everyday experience, the role of metaphor in our descriptions of the world has become more central. The language that nature speaks, as Galileo long pointed out, is mathematics. The language that ordinary human beings speak, especially those of us who are not fluent in mathematics, is metaphor. Lightman ends his discussion with another metaphor: "We are blind men, imagining what we don't see." That is a good description of theoretical physics. — Freeman Dyson

Riemann concluded that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the crumpling of our three-dimensional universe in the unseen fourth dimension. Thus a "force" has no independent life of its own; it is only the apparent effect caused by the distortion of geometry. By introducing the fourth spatial dimension, Riemann accidentally stumbled on what would become one of the dominant themes in modern theoretical physics, that the laws of nature appear simple when expressed in higher-dimensional space. He then set about developing a mathematical language in which this idea could be expressed. — Michio Kaku

If you go into any physics lab, everybody is depressed and feels isolated. We don't get any feedback that anybody cares about what we're doing. — Aaron D. O'Connell

In physics, the definition of power is the transfer of energy. We measure the power of a lightbulb in watts. The higher the wattage, the more electricity is transferred into light and heat and the more powerful the bulb. Organizations and their leaders operate exactly the same way. The more energy is transferred from the top of the organization to those who are actually doing the job, those who know more about what's going on on a daily basis, the more powerful the organization and the more powerful the leader. — Simon Sinek

According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe. — G.M. Jackson

17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein. — Hilary Kornblith

But why can't we just order what we need? Or buy it?"
Myrnin flicked the silver ring on his right hand into the bars of his cell, setting up a metallic ringing. "None of that. Modern children are fools, slaves to the work of others, dependent for everything. Not you. You will learn how to build your tools as well as use them."
"You want me to be an engineer?"
"Is it not a useful thing for one who studies physics to understand such practical applications?"
She stared at him doubtfully. "You're not going to make me get an anvil and make my own screwdrivers or anything, are you?"
Myrnin smiled slowly. "What a good idea! I'll consider it. — Rachel Caine

Unlike determinism, fatalism does not proceed by contemplating the causal mechanics of the universe-the implications for human freedom of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. Instead, the fatalist argues that his doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the logic of propositions about the future. In simplified form, a version of the argument might run as follows: If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it's false, then it is the case that I won't. Either way, it's the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won't do now. — David Foster Wallace

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea. — Richard P. Feynman

That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event - when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture? — Bryant A. Meyers

In the last four days I have got the (results) given by Tantalum, Chromium, Manganese, Iron , Nickel, Cobalt and Copper ... The chief result is that ... the result for any metal (is) quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of. — Henry Moseley

When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch! — Felix Alba-Juez

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.
What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at
rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.
Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to
then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces,
flowers. — Susanna Kaysen

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?" — Richard P. Feynman

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental-that is, a primary element of reality-then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the m ind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary. — Stephen Hawking

When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game os chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen. — Paul A.M. Dirac

A scenario is suggested by which the universe and its laws could have arisen naturally from nothing. Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable. — Victor J. Stenger

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is. — Fabiola Gianotti

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question
such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?
not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had. — C.P. Snow

It's not an academic question any more to ask what's going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know - and that means there's money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it's a problem very much of the same caliber. You're looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it's going to do next. But this is not very realistic. — James Gleick

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

A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life. — Walter Isaacson

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics. — David Goodstein

If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror. — Richard Feynman

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. — Richard Feynman

Bohr's standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves. — Erwin Schrodinger

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is. — David Gross

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. — Michael Crichton

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature. — Niels Bohr

In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds. — Albert Einstein

The way the world works now, the way the rules of engagement operate, you can't claim to make sense out of the exterior without booking voyages into the interior. Think about it: How can you understand 'it' if you haven't made any effort to understand 'you'? Because what you're really doing is establishing a living, electrical, vital, energetic connection between it and you. You're creating both of them, simultaneously. A lot like quantum physics. — Seth Godin

Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. — Ha-Joon Chang

In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world ... all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else. — John Gribbin

People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They're wrong. ... What comes first is a question, and you're already there. It's not nearly as involved as people make it out to be. — Hope Jahren

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

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

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Every action of giving creates an opposite action of receiving and what you receive is always equal to what you've given. Whatever you give out in life, must return to you. It is the physics and the mathematics of the universe. — Rhonda Byrne

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

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science. — Ha-Joon Chang

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced. — Antony Garrett Lisi

Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering. — Al Gore

God plays dice with the universe," is Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends. — James Gleick

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it. — Roger Penrose

The life force knows exactly what it takes to keep any particular living organism - any organism - alive. Anything in manifestation, for that matter. Even a rock is a manifestation of some sort, and you know, in physics and quantum physics, they know a rock is not dead. — Lindsay Wagner

Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations - to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess. — Richard Feynman

If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

I don't know what laws of physics are involved, but if you fill a gym with teenagers
and tell them to stare at one object, heat is actually produced. I half expected to
spontaneously combust.
Katrina — Suzanne Selfors

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. — Richard P. Feynman