Physics Quotes
-
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
Ernest Rutherford
-
I studied physics at university, and I'm still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.
Ben Miller
-
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
-
There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics.
Ivar Giaever
-
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.
Seth Lloyd
-
America has had the best university system in the world for a long time. And so we have been innovators, not only in the discoveries as proven by Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics and that sort of thing, but we've been able to put that into practical application with new gadgets that people admire.
Jimmy Carter
-
Classical physics has been superseded by quantum theory: quantum theory is verified by experiments. Experiments must be described in terms of classical physics.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker
-
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.'
Heidi Hammel
-
All the standard equations of mathematical physics can be separated and solved in Kerr geometry.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
-
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.
Northrop Frye
-
I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' ... Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too - romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction!
Ray Bradbury
-
It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is
Richard Feynman
-
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.
Adam Frank
-
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror.
William Kenneth Hartmann
-
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?
Edward Fredkin
-
There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.
Norwood Russell Hanson
-
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.
Brian D. McLaren
-
Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor).
Alan Sokal
-
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
Richard Feynman
-
The quantum entered physics with a jolt. It didn't fit anywhere; it made no sense; it contradicted everything we thought we knew about nature. Yet the data seemed to demand it. ... The story of Werner Heisenberg and his science is the story of the desperate failures and ultimate triumphs of the small band of brilliant physicists who-during an incredibly intense period of struggle with the data, the theories, and each other during the 1920s-brought about a revolutionary new understanding of the atomic world known as quantum mechanics.
David C. Cassidy
-
There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.
Richard Feynman
-
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. 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.
Richard Feynman
