Best 538 quotes in «physics quotes» category

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

The laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but.

The mathematicians of this world regard themselves as 'physicists,' yet they know next to nothing about Physics.

The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.

The more physics you have the less engineering you need.

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.

The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a universe made out of energy, everything is entangled; everything is one.

The physics of the 21st century shall deal essentially with non-spatial matter and non-spatial mechanics.

The next grand extensions of mathematical physics will, in all likelihood, be furnished by quaternions.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

The physics of motion provides one of the clearest examples of the counter-intuitive and unexpected nature of science.

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true.

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

There are no accidents or coincidences in life - everything is synchronicity - because everything has a frequency. It's simply the physics of life and the universe in action.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

There's no evidence whatsoever that Darwin had anything useful to say or anything to say period about how life began or how the universe began or how gravity began or how physics began or fluid motion or how thermodynamics began. He had nothing to say about that whatsoever.

The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

The whole is always more, is more capable of a much greater variety of wave states, than the combination of its parts. ... In this very radical sense, quantum physics supports the doctrine that the whole is more than the combination of its parts.

There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.

The scientists who made the atomic bomb are, in my sense, people with a tragic destiny. You know, there was the US race with Nazi Germany and good evidence that the Germans were more advanced in nuclear physics, and we had to get the bomb first. But then there was the use of that dreadful weapon, or instrument of genocide, and many of the more sensitive scientists turned quickly into anti - nuclear people - and very effective ones.

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.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. Refering to James Clerk Maxwell's contributions to physics.

Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events.

Whenever I want to represent or depict the official version, I will refer to them as 'mathematicians' or 'mathematical physicists' or idiots or something like that. There are no physicists in mainstream 'Physics.' From Newton to Einstein to Hawking, they are all just mathematicians as far as Science and Physics are concerned.

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.

When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.

When people's ill, they come to I, I Physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em; Sometimes they live, sometimes they die. What's that to I? I lets 'em.

Why can't parents dance? Is it some universal law of physics or something?

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

You can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.

A billion neutrinos go swimming in heavy water: one gets wet.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:] We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber.

60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel

A century ago, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of space, time, energy and matter. We are still finding awesome confirmations of his predictions, like the gravitational waves observed in 2016 by the LIGO experiment. When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind. Where did his ingenious ideas come from? A blend of qualities, perhaps: intuition, originality, brilliance. Einstein had the ability to look beyond the surface to reveal the underlying structure. He was undaunted by common sense, the idea that things must be the way they seemed. He had the courage to pursue ideas that seemed absurd to others. And this set him free to be ingenious, a genius of his time and every other. A key element for Einstein was imagination. Many of his discoveries came from his ability to reimagine the universe through thought experiments. At the age of sixteen, when he visualised riding on a beam of light, he realised that from this vantage light would appear as a frozen wave. That image ultimately led to the theory of special relativity. One hundred years later, physicists know far more about the universe than Einstein did. Now we have greater tools for discovery, such as particle accelerators, supercomputers, space telescopes and experiments such as the LIGO lab’s work on gravitational waves. Yet imagination remains our most powerful attribute. With it, we can roam anywhere in space and time. We can witness nature’s most exotic phenomena while driving in a car, snoozing in bed or pretending to listen to someone boring at a party.

A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.

After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the enormous amount of material that has been accumulated in sixty years of spectroscopic research that it seemed at first beyond the possibility of disentanglement. An almost greater enlightenment has resulted from the seven years of Röntgen spectroscopy, inasmuch as it has attacked the problem of the atom at its very root, and illuminates the interior. What we are nowadays hearing of the language of spectra is a true 'music of the spheres' in order and harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. The theory of spectral lines will bear the name of Bohr for all time. But yet another name will be permanently associated with it, that of Planck. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?

A human being born at one of Uranus's poles would be a middle-aged man at sunset and a very old man before it was time for a second sunrise.