Quotes and Sayings about Physics
"Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power."
- John Adams
(Related: Power, Thought, Choice, Liberty, Metaphysics, Self)
"I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs."
- Hannes Alfven
(Related: Work, Physics, Present, Universe)
"Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics."
- Steve Allen
(Related: Energy, Mystery, Physics)
"My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
- Sidney Altman
(Related: Technology, Events, Intention, Physics, Study, University)
"I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics."
- Sidney Altman
(Related: Work, Opportunity, Months, Physics, University, Waiting)
"Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics."
- Sidney Altman
(Related: Months, Physics, Summer)
"I went to the University of Washington as a physics and astronomy major. My other interest, of course, was aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot. And if you're going to fly airplanes, the best place to be is the Air Force."
- Michael P. Anderson
(Related: Airplanes, Astronomy, Aviation, Force, Interest, Physics, University, Washington)
"Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Astronomy, Fiction, Future, Physics, Ships, Space)
"Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators."
- Dave Barry
(Related: Causes, Class, Force, Physics)
"The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion."
- Michael Behe
(Related: Religion, Thought, Comfort, Physics)
"It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth."
- Daniel Bernoulli
(Related: Earth, Mathematicians, Physics)
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature."
- Niels Bohr
(Related: Nature, Physics, Wrong)
"If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them."
- Niels Bohr
(Related: First, Physics)
"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy."
- Max Born
(Related: Now, Philosophy, Physics)
"Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist."
- Walther Bothe
(Related: Exaggeration, Physics, Tools, Will)
"Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct."
- F. H. Bradley
(Related: Instinct, Metaphysics)
"Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time."
- David R. Brower
(Related: Love, Time, Cancer, Man, Physics, Understanding, Will)
"Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation."
- George E. Brown, Jr.
(Related: Being, Physics)
"It's not magic! It's physics. The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright. It's like a spinning top."
- Deborah Bull
(Related: Physics)
"Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics."
- Ken Burns
(Related: Music, American, Physics)
"Most medical physicists work in the physics of radiation oncology making sure that the desired dose is given to the cancer and the dose to normal tissues are minimized."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, Work, Cancer, Physics)
"Medical physics is an applied area of physics."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, Physics)
"I have devoted much time and energy to helping medical physics in developing countries."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, Time, Countries, Energy, Physics)
"I was the Chair of the first department of medical physics in a medical school in the U.S."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, First, Physics, School)
"When I entered medical physics in 1958 there were fewer than 100 in the U.S. and I could see many opportunities to apply my knowledge of nuclear physics."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, Knowledge, Physics)
"The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job."
- John Cameron
(Related: Medical, Technology, Growth, Job, Now, Physics, Today, Training)
"Nuclear physics is interesting but it is unlikely to help society."
- John Cameron
(Related: Society, Help, Physics)
"If someone is interested in medicine and also in physics and they like working with people and communicate well with others, I would strongly encourage them."
- John Cameron
(Related: People, Medicine, Physics)
"Well, I'm leaning probably toward the sciences like physics."
- Amy Carter
(Related: Physics)
"The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force."
- Nancy Cartwright
(Related: Facts, Force, Laws, Physics, Reality)
"Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league."
- John Henry Carver
(Related: Work, Energy, Physics)
"I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics."
- John Henry Carver
(Related: Mathematics, Physics, University)
"My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine."
- John Henry Carver
(Related: Science, War, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, University)
"Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with."
- David Chalmers
(Related: Science, Computer, Consciousness, Mathematics, Physics)
"The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one."
- Owen Chamberlain
(Related: Science, Development, Physics)
"My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity."
- Steven Chu
(Related: Body, Day, Gravity, Physics, Questions)
"Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology."
- Thomas Cochrane
(Related: Morals, Physics, Relativity)
"There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Physics)
"While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time."
- James Cronin
(Related: Time, Ideas, Chicago, Interest, Physics)
"I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison."
- James Cronin
(Related: Direction, Physics)
"In 1971 I returned to the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics."
- James Cronin
(Related: Chicago, Physics, University)
"Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics."
- Aleister Crowley
(Related: Opportunity, Errors, Judgment, Magic, Physics, Practice)
"A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory."
- Richard Dawkins
(Related: Religion, God, Physics, Theory, Universe)
"Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know."
- John Deacon
(Related: Science, Physics, Students)
"I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it."
- David Deutsch
(Related: Time, Travel, Day, Forbidden, Laws, Physics, Will)
"The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing."
- Wilhelm Dilthey
(Related: Religion, Healing, Metaphysics)
"However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century."
- Wilhelm Dilthey
(Related: History, Society, Time, Metaphysics, Old)
"Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day."
- Wilhelm Dilthey
(Related: Day, Metaphysics, Religious)
"The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved."
- Paul Dirac
(Related: Difficulty, Fact, Laws, Lies, Physics, Treatment)
"I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition."
- Paul Dirac
(Related: Poetry, Work, Time, Man, Opposition, Physics)
"The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers."
- Paul Dirac
(Related: Thought, Numbers, Physics)
"Just the actual physics of putting it all together, you know, the latter period is actually quite fragmented in terms of the licenses and all those things so it makes a compilation of the full twenty years really a technical minefield."
- Geoff Downes
(Related: Physics, Years)
"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset."
- Arthur Eddington
(Related: Deals, Determinism, Physics)
"In physics, to be in two places at the same time would be a miracle; in politics it seems not merely normal, but natural."
- Charles Edison
(Related: Politics, Time, Physics)
"It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Laws, Physics)
"I was always good at math and science and physics."
- Daniel J. Evans
(Related: Science, Physics)
"I like physics. I think it is the best science out of all three of them, because generally it's more useful. You learn about speed and velocity and time, and that's all clever stuff."
- Tom Felton
(Related: Science, Time, Physics)
"I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time."
- Jerome Isaac Friedman
(Related: Time, Excitement, Physics, Sense)
"Experimental high energy physics research is a group effort. I have been very fortunate to have had outstanding students and colleagues who have made invaluable contributions to the research with which I have been associated."
- Jerome Isaac Friedman
(Related: Effort, Energy, Physics, Research, Students)
"The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time."
- James J. Gibson
(Related: Time, Mathematics, Physics, Space, World)
"How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."
- John Gilmore
(Related: Society, Laws, Mathematics, Physics, Privacy, Want)
"That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics."
- Gordon Gould
(Related: Attitude, Physics, Today)
"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Time, Science, Possibility, Apples, Merit, Physics, Tomorrow)
"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Literature, Nothing, Physics, Pleasure, Worth, Writing)
"The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer."
- Alfred Whitney Griswold
(Related: God, Policy, Computer, Land, Law, Physics)
"The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness."
- Stanislav Grof
(Related: Consciousness, Formula, Infinite, Physics)
"Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Nature, Nothing, Physics, Reason, Word)
"It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope."
- Tom Hanks
(Related: Poetry, Inspiring, Physics)
"To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Being, Metaphysics)
"When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Being, Formula, Physics, World)
"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science."
- Werner Heisenberg
(Related: Science, Development, Feeling, Physics)
"Yes, I was really good in physics and in math."
- Eva Herzigova
(Related: Physics)
"From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary."
- Victor Francis Hess
(Related: Work, Consideration, Facts, Physics, Problems, Years)
"Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern."
- Antony Hewish
(Related: Audiences, Concern, Physics, Teaching, University)
"Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists."
- David Hilbert
(Related: Physics)
"Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Nothing, Physics)
"If you miss one day in physics, that's it."
- Robert Iler
(Related: Day, Physics)
"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."
- William James
(Related: Effort, Metaphysics, Nothing)
"The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work."
- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(Related: Medical, Work, Literary, Physics, Zoology)
"Logic works, metaphysics contemplates."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Logic, Metaphysics)
"Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck."
- Immanuel Kant
(Related: Metaphysics, Ocean)
"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."
- Lord Kelvin
(Related: Science, Physics, Rest)
"Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics."
- Aaron Klug
(Related: Physics)
"Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron."
- Walter Kohn
(Related: Physics)
"We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics."
- Polykarp Kusch
(Related: Science, Physics)
"It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists."
- Robert B. Laughlin
(Related: Age, First, Old, Physics, Years)
"The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large."
- Tim Berners Lee
(Related: Engineering, Now, Physics)
"I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind."
- Gyorgy Legeti
(Related: Mind, Physics, Study, Want, Years)
"Physics is experience, arranged in economical order."
- Ernst Mach
(Related: Experience, Order, Physics)
"Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance."
- Ernst Mach
(Related: Science, Development, Physics, Senses, Support)
"You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination."
- Maimonides
(Related: Imagination, Astronomy, Doubt, Necessity, Physics, Providence, Reality, Will, World)
"Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics."
- Maimonides
(Related: First, Logic, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Order, Perfection, Study, Wishes)
"He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity."
- Maimonides
(Related: Religion, Infidelity, Metaphysics, Will)
"When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed."
- Benoit Mandelbrot
(Related: Laws, Physics, Rules, Weather)
"Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics."
- Benoit Mandelbrot
(Related: Physics)
"Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition."
- Murray Gell Mann
(Related: Chaos, Physics, Sense, Word, Writers)
"I do not keep up with the details of particle physics."
- Murray Gell Mann
(Related: Physics)
"If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it."
- Murray Gell Mann
(Related: Physics, Talk)
"Metaphysics is a science."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Science, Metaphysics)
"It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Metaphysics, Right)
"Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy."
- Guglielmo Marconi
(Related: Science, Committee, Philosophy, Physics, Reward, Workers)
"Nevertheless, if I have at times been able to make original contributions in the accelerator field, I cannot help feeling that to a certain extent my slightly amateur approach in physics, combined with much practical experience, was an asset."
- Simon van der Meer
(Related: Experience, Feeling, Help, Physics)
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."
- H. L. Mencken
(Related: Forbidden, Mathematics, Now, Physics, Pregnancy, Woman)
"The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this."
- Ralph Merkle
(Related: Technology, Laws, Physics)
"I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics."
- Michel de Montaigne
(Related: Metaphysics, Study)
"Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Physics, University)
"Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry."
- Johannes P. Muller
(Related: Science, Actions, Laws, Physics, Present)
"At the moment I'm doing this space movie, so I'm obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it's gone. Then I'll be able to superficially say stuff about space."
- Cillian Murphy
(Related: Travel, Months, Physics, Space)
"Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity."
- Joyce Carol Oates
(Related: Accident, Divinity, Laws, Nothing, Physics, Universe)
"I'm the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys' school in Sydney."
- Alex O'Loughlin
(Related: Father, Son, Boys, Physics, School)
"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
(Related: Perception, Children, Physics, Problems)
"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it."
- Boris Pasternak
(Related: Forbidden, Metaphysics)
"Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters."
- Pope Paul VI
(Related: Change, Nature, Power, Science, Behavior, Man, Physics, World, Yield)
"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."
- Roger Penrose
(Related: Trust, Mathematics, Physics)
"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates."
- Fernando Pessoa
(Related: Earth, Metaphysics)
"Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food."
- Robert M. Pirsig
(Related: Food, Metaphysics)
"If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Deep, Physics, Problems, Wishes)
"No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry."
- Michael Polanyi
(Related: Laws, Physics)
"But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography."
- Michael Polanyi
(Related: Physics)
"And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry."
- Michael Polanyi
(Related: Explanations, Physics)
"So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world."
- John Polkinghorne
(Related: Metaphysics, World)
"Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons."
- John Polkinghorne
(Related: Work, Physics, Reality, World)
"I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943."
- John Pople
(Related: College, Examination, Mathematics, October, Physics, Trinity, University)
"Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump."
- Willard Van Orman Quine
(Related: Nature, Physics, Psychology, World)
"In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics."
- James Rainwater
(Related: Mathematics, Physics, School)
"Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic."
- John Ray
(Related: Arithmetic, Metaphysics)
"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality."
- William Winwood Reade
(Related: Religion, Success, Morality, Buddhism, Mankind, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Spirit)
"I teach metaphysics and pastor a church."
- Della Reese
(Related: Church, Metaphysics)
"I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology."
- Frederick Reines
(Related: Science, Technology, Engineering, Physics)
"In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me."
- Burton Richter
(Related: Technology, First, Physics)
"My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane."
- Sally Ride
(Related: Mission, Physics)
"We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology."
- Jeremy Rifkin
(Related: Age, First, Physics)
"Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics."
- Terry Riley
(Related: Laws, Physics)
"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Science, Power, Energy, Physics, Sense)
"The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Physics)
"We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic."
- David Russell
(Related: Logic, Physics, World)
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
- Ernest Rutherford
(Related: Science, Physics)
"During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics I had learned."
- Martin Ryle
(Related: Experience, War, People, Development, Engineering, Physics, Understanding, Years)
"In 1948 I was appointed to a Lectureship in Physics and in 1949 elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College."
- Martin Ryle
(Related: College, Physics, Trinity)
"In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons."
- Andrei Sakharov
(Related: Physics, Research, Scientists, Weapons)
"Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked."
- Abdus Salam
(Related: Quality, Patience, Physics)
"The creation of Physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North and South have equally participated in it."
- Abdus Salam
(Related: Creation, Mankind, Physics)
"Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe."
- Erwin Schrodinger
(Related: Oneness, Physics, Universe)
"The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model."
- Erwin Schrodinger
(Related: Fact, Metaphysics, Years)
"A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement."
- Erwin Schrodinger
(Related: Meaning, Observation, Physics, Preparation)
"Today's particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar - and they had the ability to investigate it."
- Dwight Schultz
(Related: Ability, Light, May, Physics, Space, Today)
"Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man's contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output."
- Robert L. Scotto
(Related: Effect, Energy, Laws, Man, Physics)
"Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly."
- Swami Sivananda
(Related: Religion, Science, Argument, Metaphysics)
"Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us."
- Huston Smith
(Related: Science, Metaphysics)
"Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it."
- Frederick Soddy
(Related: Physics, Reason)
"It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Funny, Men, People, Action, Physics)
"The NFL today has bigger, stronger, bodies than ever, moving faster than ever, hitting a stationary object harder than ever before - so the physics of the hit have changed."
- Leigh Steinberg
(Related: Physics, Today)
"I had no new ideas on the physics we might learn, and I could not compete with the younger generation."
- Jack Steinberger
(Related: Ideas, Physics)
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Imagination, Life, Metaphysics, Mind)
"There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation."
- Patrick Stewart
(Related: Business, Books, Physics, Style)
"They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech."
- James Stockdale
(Related: Physics)
"Physics has the cutest words."
- Sherry Stringfield
(Related: Physics, Words)
"An hour or two spent in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day pass busily."
- Hudson Stuck
(Related: History, Day, Geography, Physics, Reading, Writing)
"The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence."
- James Joseph Sylvester
(Related: Intelligence, Laws, Mathematics, Physics, World)
"Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not."
- Edward Teller
(Related: Physics)
"I grew up wanting to be a musician, but my parents were sure I would starve to death. So, they put me in physics and chemistry. That eventually blew up, and I got into radio."
- John Tesh
(Related: Death, Parents, Physics)
"I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus."
- Debi Thomas
(Related: Physics)
"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Life, Physics, Safety, Software)
"When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics."
- Voltaire
(Related: Metaphysics)
"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
- Walt Whitman
(Related: Books, Metaphysics)
"But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire."
- Benjamin Whorf
(Related: People, Behavior, Fire, Meaning, Physics)
"Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them."
- Eugene Wigner
(Related: Nature, Fact, Old, Physics, Problems)
"My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage."
- Kenneth G. Wilson
(Related: Marriage, Work, Mother, Father, Physics, University)
"Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle."
- Edward Witten
(Related: Physics, Uncertainty)
"As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore."
- Edward Witten
(Related: Experience, Life, Building, Gravity, Physics)
"Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."
- Edward Witten
(Related: Nature, Work, Physics, Simplicity, Theory)