Physics Quotes
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Theoretical physics hardly requires any research funding, so I never felt the need. The overall government and institutional support has been good enough for my work.
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I'm doing physics because I'm curious about how it works - full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, don't worry about whether somebody is going to be able to do an experiment next week, just figure it out.
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Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.
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The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.
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The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of the mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was the most successful... Relativity took over in field physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics... In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became... ‘sciences of organized complexity’ — that is, systems sciences.
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There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.
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Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?
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Then we'll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry.
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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.
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Physics has never been a comfortable subject for human psychology. The desire to regard everything outside the human race's purview as insignificant, and everything within that purview as firmly under the control of tribal myth and custom, is as strong today as it was in the time of Galileo.
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Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
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Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era.
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The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence.
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How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.
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I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.
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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.
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That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
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For many years quantum physics had been giving indications that there are levels of reality other than the material level.
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The laissez-faire attitude to science education has resulted in a disaster exemplified by the fact that more young people are opting for media studies than physics.
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Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.
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It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition that physics is computer-simulatable is right, physical law is wrong.
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I was a senior research scientist that changed the accepted view of the structure of the universe.I disproved one of the then widely accepted “laws” of physics, 'the conversation of parity', by proving that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike.
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Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.
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I've talked to ghosts once. For me, it makes sense for them to be real because of physics. In physics, you can't destroy energy; it can only be conserved.
