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Physics Quotes

Browse 1726 quotes about Physics.

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Physics Quotes

“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.”

HumansTodayScienceDesireStrongRacePsychologySubjectsComfortableRegardMythPhysicsHuman RaceCustomsInsignificant
Book:The decline and fall of science
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“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'”

KnowsInspirationalPlayHumorMotivationalFunnyScienceInterestInspiringEducationCreativityLearningResearchDiscoveryScientistExcitingHearingPhysicsPhrasesProgrammingSkepticismScience And ReligionSkepticalSkepticComputer ProgrammingComputer ScienceProgramming LanguagesScience And TechnologySerendipityScientific MethodModern ScienceAstonishmentComputer LanguageScientific ResearchNewnessProclamationScientific DiscoveryScience ReligionNew DiscoveriesGreat ScienceScientific FactsScience PhysicsScience TechnologyFunny ScienceScience ResearchWork PlayDiscovery In ScienceScience LifeAdvances In ScienceSimple SolutionsScience ClassMotivational EducationProgress In ScienceDiscovering The TruthInspirational ScienceAcademic LifeScientist LifeEarth ScienceScience Fair
Author:Isaac Asimov
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“We all need to learn a new language for love - a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other's uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support.”

NeedsSpeakLanguageSupportEmotionalDelightPhysicsPracticalsMutualUniquenessFascinationSockPaychecksPancakesEmotional Support
Book:Wishcraft: How to Get what You Really Want
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“Atlantis was a highly evolved civilization where the sciences and arts were far more advanced than one might guess. Atlantis was technologically advanced in genetic engineering, computer science, inter-dimensional physics, and artistically developed with electronic music and crystal art forms.”

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Author:Frederick Lenz
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“Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level.”

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Author:Ravi Gomatam
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“Astronomy is so easy to love. ... Fairly or not, physics is associated with nuclear bombs and nuclear waste, chemistry with pesticides, biology with Frankenfood and designer-gene superbabies. But astronomers are like responsible ecotourists, squinting at the scenery through high-quality optical devices, taking nothing but images that may be computer-enhanced for public distribution, leaving nothing but a few Land Rover footprints on faraway Martian soil, and OK, OK, maybe the Land Rover, too.”

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Author:Natalie Angier
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“Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor.”

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Author:Andrew Lo
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“Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.”

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Book:An Interpretation of Christian Ethics
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“Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.”

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Book:Arrival (Stories of Your Life MTI)
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“The general notions about human understanding...which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture, they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.”

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Author:J. Robert Oppenheimer
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“Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.”

IdeasLanguageInterestGoldMathematicsLaysWestPhysicsSatisfiedClarityChemistryTypicalMagicianAlchemistTheoremsDensCharlatansIgnobleEuclid
Author:Primo Levi
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“Compare mathematics and the political sciences - it's quite striking. 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 the concern for content.”

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Book:The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
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“I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.”

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Author:Richard Lewontin
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“Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then natural philosophy became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time theres a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.”

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Author:Lawrence M. Krauss
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“The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesnt obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.”

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Author:Trudi Canavan
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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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Book:Essays in Religion and Morality
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