Best 538 quotes in «physics quotes» category

I have been able to solve a few problems of mathematical physics on which the greatest mathematicians since Euler have struggled in vain ... But the pride I might have held in my conclusions was perceptibly lessened by the fact that I knew that the solution of these problems had almost always come to me as the gradual generalization of favorable examples, by a series of fortunate conjectures, after many errors. I am fain to compare myself with a wanderer on the mountains who, not knowing the path, climbs slowly and painfully upwards and often has to retrace his steps because he can go no further—then, whether by taking thought or from luck, discovers a new track that leads him on a little till at length when he reaches the summit he finds to his shame that there is a royal road by which he might have ascended, had he only the wits to find the right approach to it. In my works, I naturally said nothing about my mistake to the reader, but only described the made track by which he may now reach the same heights without difficulty.

I could use the fresh air. I think that put my brain to sleep.” She pointed at the text as if it was a piece of rotten meat. “Physics?” I said. “You must need a more advanced text.” “No, it’s just boring.” I picked the book up and double checked the title, to make sure I hadn’t misidentified the subject. “Boring?” I said. “How can physics be …?” I looked up to see she’d already left the room. Simon pointed at the text, grinned and faked a yawn. “Hold on,” I said, striding after her. “Physics is not boring. Maybe you just need me to explain it better. Chloe? Chloe!

I have led an extraordinary life on this planet, while at the same time travelling across the universe by using my mind and the laws of physics. I have been to the furthest reaches of our galaxy, travelled into a black hole and gone back to the beginning of time. On Earth, I have experienced highs and lows, turbulence and peace, success and suffering. I have been rich and poor, I have been able-bodied and disabled. I have been praised and criticised, but never ignored. I have been enormously privileged, through my work, in being able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. But it would be an empty universe indeed if it were not for the people I love, and who love me. Without them, the wonder of it all would be lost on me. And at the end of all this, the fact that we humans, who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature, have been able to come to an understanding of the laws governing us, and our universe, is a great triumph. I want to share my excitement about these big questions and my enthusiasm about this quest.

I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ... Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, .... January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer. February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: "A revelation!" March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: "I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work." September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's "indefatigable efforts.

In a nice little house in Atro City there lived a man called Doktor Gleichstein. He was a kind of scientist, and he was very good at his job, which is why he always worked from home. He looked a little funny because he kept losing his eyebrows. Quantum Physics, is sort of like ordinary Physics, only you tend to spend a lot more time looking for the cat. He worked in the sitting room because he’d blown the garage up once already. Apparently a lot of things happened by accident in Quantum Physics.

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

I'll never understand. Advanced physics is about describing things you can't know intuitively, so you describe it in numbers, but I've got it in front of me." He was looking around the room rather than at her. He seemed to like it, and since coming in, had eased closer to the burners. "It's like listening to blind people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I'm not even very interested in elephants.

Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.

In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.

In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

In modern society, it is not enough to be an engineer, a doctor, a chemist, a biologist, or a physicist, you must be all of them to understand why human health is failing on such a massive scale.

‎In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.

In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.

...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.

Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students never wonder when they will use this information in their "real life". Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve protecting the City from all threat while wearing spandex. As a law-abiding citizen, this notion fills me with a great sense of security, knowing as I do how many of my scientist colleagues could charitably be termed "mad".

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137: Bethe was mischievous with 137 Bohr was intrigued by 137 Born was mystified by 137 Fermi was frisky with 137 Feynman was mesmerized by 137 Heisenberg was fascinated by 137 Lederman was enchanted by 137 Pauli was consumed by 137 Turing was matched by 137

In the history of philosophy, the term “rationalism” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, it signifies an unbreached commitment to reasoned thought in contrast to any irrationalist rejection of the mind. In this sense, Aristotle and Ayn Rand are preeminent rationalists, opposed to any form of unreason, including faith. In a narrower sense, however, rationalism contrasts with empiricism as regards the false dichotomy between commitment to so-called “pure” reason (i.e., reason detached from perceptual reality) and an exclusive reliance on sense experience (i.e., observation without inference therefrom). Rationalism, in this sense, is a commitment to reason construed as logical deduction from non-observational starting points, and a distrust of sense experience (e.g., the method of Descartes). Empiricism, according to this mistaken dichotomy, is a belief that sense experience provides factual knowledge, but any inference beyond observation is a mere manipulation of words or verbal symbols (e.g., the approach of Hume). Both Aristotle and Ayn Rand reject such a false dichotomy between reason and sense experience; neither are rationalists in this narrow sense. Theology is the purest expression of rationalism in the sense of proceeding by logical deduction from premises ungrounded in observable fact—deduction without reference to reality. The so-called “thinking” involved here is purely formal, observationally baseless, devoid of facts, cut off from reality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was history’s foremost expert regarding the field of “angelology.” No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

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.

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy. One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.

In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect - a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities - miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction.

I noticed that the [drawing] teacher didn't tell people much... Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques - so many mathematical methods - that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy." because *some* artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.

Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.

In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.

In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” “I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks” of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.

In the far future, which promises to be vastly longer than our past (like a googolplex of years to our future versus 13.8 billion years to our past), all of the stars in the universe will have run out of fuel. Those that can will collapse to black holes; eventually everything will fall into stellar-mass black holes, and those black holes will fall into supermassive black holes, and then all of the black holes in the universe will eventually vaporize into Hawking radiation. This will take a very long time. ("Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.") All of the Hawking radiation will dissipate in an ever-expanding cosmos, unable to fill the swelling void, and the light in the universe will go out. Eventually, ever particle will find itself alone, no bright sky above, no luminous solar systems below. For now, we're here and the skies are bright, if somewhat quite. The gamble is that the skies aren't silent.

Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT!

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it. The example of the discoveries of Nobel is characteristic, as powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who lead the peoples towards war. I am one of those who believe with Nobel that mankind will derive more good than harm from the new discoveries.

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible. [Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics.

It is interesting to note that the quantum-mechanical revolution was made by a virtually orphaned generation of scientists. Many members of the generation above them had been slaughtered in World War I. There simply weren't many senior scientists around to tell them they were crazy.

I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax

It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.

It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.

It is said that Mathematics is the language of nature. If so, Physics is its poetry.

In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes. {Advising his student, Max Planck, whom he advised in 1878, not to go into physics, at at the University of Munich}

It was like bouncing tennis balls off a mystery piece of furniture and deducing, from the direction in which the balls ricocheted, whether it was a chair or a table or a Welsh dresser.

It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physical optics and appears to open a new field.

It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. [Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]

Love is a chemical reaction, But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science. Love is the most powerful form of energy, But science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, But even the most advanced physician Cannot prescribe it as medicine. INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem

I was a young impressionable 13 year old hearing the pro-left and pro-right argument. So one day I would be convinced that one side was right. the other day I would be convinced the other side was right. And then I was getting confused. How can both of these things be true if they were contrary to each other. So I decided to focus on a field where the truth didn't dependent upon the eloquence of the speaker. The truth was absolute.

Lots of wrongs eventually makes it right!

Many scientists have tried to make determinism and complementarity the basis of conclusions that seem to me weak and dangerous; for instance, they have used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to bolster up human free will, though his principle, which applies exclusively to the behavior of electrons and is the direct result of microphysical measurement techniques, has nothing to do with human freedom of choice. It is far safer and wiser that the physicist remain on the solid ground of theoretical physics itself and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations.

Mapenzi, kama ilivyo kwa vitu vyote hapa ulimwenguni, hayawezi kuwepo bila kujumuishwa na fizikia na kemia yake! Bila kemia hakuna mapenzi ya kudumu. Tamaa ya ngono kimsingi huanza pindi unapokutana na mtu. Tamaa hiyo huweza kukua na kuwa kitu kingine kadiri muda unavyokwenda lakini chanzo kinakuwepo toka siku ya kwanza mlipokutana. Kemikali inayosababisha tamaa ya ngono na hata kuikuza tamaa hiyo ni 'phenyl ethylamine' ('fino itholamine') au PEA ambayo ni kemikali ya mapenzi ndani ya ubongo. Husisimua watu na huongeza nguvu za kimwili (fizikia) na kihisia (kemia). Tamaa husababisha mtu azalishe PEA nyingi zaidi, kitu kinachosababisha kujisikia kizunguzungu (cha hisia za kimapenzi) na dalili zingine kama magoti kutetemeka, jasho kutoka viganjani na kutokutulia. Kemikali hii inapozalishwa kwa kiwango kikubwa, hutuma alamu ('signals') kutoka kwenye ubongo mpaka kwenye viungo vingine vya mwili na kutumika kama 'dopamine' au 'amphetamine' ambazo ni kemikali za ulevi ndani ya ubongo. Iwapo unajiuliza kwa nini wewe au mtu mwingine unavutiwa na mtu ambaye hamwendani kimapenzi, inaweza kuwa ni kwa sababu una kiwango kikubwa cha kemikali hizo kuliko mwenzako, kitu ambacho huzidi uwezo wa kutumia kichwa na kutoa maamuzi bora kulingana na akili ya kuzaliwa. Kwa jumla, mapenzi yote ya kweli uhitaji angalau kiwango kidogo cha PEA kwa wale wanaopendana. Cha msingi kukumbuka ni kwamba kemikali hizi huja kwa vituo, nikiwa simaanishi kwamba tamaa ya ngono hupotea pale mtu anapoelekea kwenye uhusiano wa kudumu. Lakini mambo hubadilika. Hatuwezi kuvumilia zile hisia kali kadiri tunavyozidi kusafiri kuelekea kwenye uhusiano wa kudumu na kwenye maisha ya pamoja yenye furaha. Katika uhusiano wenye afya hata hivyo matatizo hutokea hapa na pale. Chanzo cha Murphy na Debbie kupendana kilikuwa kemia zaidi kuliko fizikia. Kama hakuna kemia hakuna mapenzi.