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Physics Quotes

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Physics Quotes

“The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

“When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're speaking to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts.”

“When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.”

“There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars.”

“On the one hand, technology is more mysterious. On the other hand, we're more aware of its limitations. Every time I watch Star Trek, I'm highly aware of magical everything is: the holodeck, the warp drive. It's possible that with wormholes we might eventually be able to do something like that. But the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving.”

“My personal background is actually very unusual for the kind of career I chose. I didnÂ’t meet anyone who had ever done physics in my life. I grew up in the Himalayan forests. My father was a forest conservator, which meant that if I wasnÂ’t in school I was in the forests with him. That has been very largely responsible for my ecological inclinations.”

“Everyone and everything that shows up in the world of form in this universe originates not from a particle, as quantum physics teaches us, but from an energy field. That energy field can be called God, soul, spirit, or consciousness. It looks a certain way, sounds a certain way, and feels a certain way. I try to stay in harmony with what I believe it sounds and feels like.”

“But even technical work filled with formulas can be valuable and important. Einstein offered a lot of technical work on quantum physics, which mostly eludes me. I refer to his work, and I have studied it, but I am not a physicist. But look at Einstein's simple statement that the most important decision you ever will make is the decision whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe.”

“The biggest questions that always have perplexed me are "Where do I come from?" and "Where am I going?" The "Where do I come from?" question, which I think I largely am answering now, is about what quantum physics teaches us. If you try to find your source, you are not going to find it in a tiny little particle that began with your parents commingling.”

“The key is to trust in your own divinity, to know that you are a piece of God, and that you are like what you came from. As a spiritual being, you have Divinity within. When Albert Einstein was asked about the impact of quantum physics, he said, "It's just all details, I just want to think like God thinks." And God thinks in terms of creating, kindness, beauty and goodness.”

“Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the 'causal completeness of physics' - every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be physical things.”

“A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific practice. Chemists don't derive their laws from fundamental physics, so reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of thing makes for bad philosophy.”

“That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.”

“In quantum mechanics there is A causing B. The equations do not stand outside that usual paradigm of physics. The real issue is that the kinds of things you predict in quantum mechanics are different from the kinds of things you predict using general relativity. Quantum mechanics, that big, new, spectacular remarkable idea is that you only predict probabilities, the likelihood of one outcome or another. That's the new idea.”

“17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.”

“If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.”

“Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues as real-world communication, you basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want.”

“My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.”

“I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.”

“I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.”

“There was a period there where I was like, "No, no, no, this is crazy. I don't want to take any more drawing classes and talk about what looks best. I want to study math and psychology and physics and all these nerdy things with computers." That was fun and great, but that didn't work out. At the end of high school, I was like, "Uhh, what's easier? Drawing is easier, I'll do that".”