Physics Quotes
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People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.
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With Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, and God being seen as the powerful machine operator who perfectly controls the machine through these orderly laws, we end up with the opposite problem, the very opposite of the ancient situation. Now, instead of chaos reigning and us wondering if there's any order, order reigns supreme, and we wonder if there's any freedom.
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The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.
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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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All of you have now lost your virginity... in Physics!
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[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.
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When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'
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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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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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The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.
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The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.
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Stewart Davenport conscientiously and insightfully re-creates the world of the nineteenth-century political economists, who taught that the principles of international trade manifested, like the laws of biology and physics, the intelligent design of a Divine Creator.
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Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics.
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Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.
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That our knowledge only illuminates a small corner of the Universe, that it is incomplete, approximate, tentative and merely probable need not concert us. It is genuine nevertheless. Physical science stands as one of the great achievements of the human spirit.
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There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.
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We're machines for turning caffeine into physics.
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Under the roof of one controversial assumption about physics, we discuss five big questions that can be addressed using concepts from a modern understanding of digital informational processes. The assumption is called finite nature. The digital mechanics model is obtained by applying the assumption to physics. The questions are as follows: 1. What is the origin of spin? 2. Why are there symmetries and CPT (charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal)? 3. What is the origin of length? 4. What does a process model of motion tell us? 5. Can the finite nature assumption account for the efficacy of quantum mechanics?
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Science may explain the world, but we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us
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People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics, I think, are more indicative of problems with some things going on at the frontier of physics than ideas that are gonna last.
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It's interesting to see what's going on with physics these days because they're starting to come out with stuff that sounds remarkably like Buddhism and even more specifically like the ancient Hindu Vedas. Physics isn't necessarily saying the exact same thing but I think eventually it will merge.
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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.
