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Physics Quotes

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Physics Quotes

“Any really good scientist is as much an artist as a scientist. All the interesting stuff is found on the edge between knowing and not knowing. I know that sounds like a meditation teacher speaking, but when you're in the laboratory, or you're theorizing about physics, you need to know what you know, but if you can't get out from under that, you won't be able to make that insightful, first-time connection that nobody else has seen before.”

“Many quantum physics are realizing or hypothesizing that consciousness is not a byproduct of evolution as has been suggested. Or for that matter, an expression of our brains, although it expresses itself through our brains. But consciousness is the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for our behaviors, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology.”

“The main thing to understand about the current state of physics is that we have - are in some sense, a kind of victim of our own success. We have an incredibly successful theory called the Standard Model. And it really explains everything that we can observe about and in terms of a very small number of elementary particles and some basic forces between them. And it's a quite beautiful theory and it really is just absurdly successful.”

“Beauty means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. A lot of different ways in which things can be beautiful. But this really has a very specific meaning and which is more along the lines of elegance which is that we say an idea is beautiful or elegant in mathematics or physics if a very simple principle or a very simple idea, or simple set of ideas, turns out to be very powerful and leads to all sort of unexpected structure and unexpected predictions.”

“There's a law of physics: For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. And sometimes that shows up in politics and society. And I think that the reaction to President Trump's decision on the Paris Agreement has been much stronger than I had even hoped for. And the determination being expressed by so many people in state governments, city governments, in the business community, the investor community, is really heartening to me.”

“In physics there's the old law for every action there's a equal amount of reaction. Sometimes that's true in politics. If somebody's out there making nonsensical statements, but wielding power behind them a lot of people say, "Well, I need to react to that." Another reason for the increased prominence of the climate-change issue is the Paris Agreement itself. It's not a small thing when just about every nation in the entire world comes together and makes an historic agreement like this. It's a big deal. And the old cliché "The train is leaving the station" kind of applies.”

“Quantum physics says that there is an infinite number of possibilities and parallels to the one that we know, and every event is also played out in a parallel world. It's kind of a crazy idea, but someone called Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam says that if you could back up your memory in case of a catastrophic event, you could actually revert to that back-up and find an alternative world in which the Earth didn't explode or collide with Mars.”

“The most fun is to inhabit the world where cartoon physics is king. And that just means that things move with kind of an energy and exaggeration and appeal that is different from what we see in our world. We're bound by, at least, Newton's Laws of physics here and in animation we're not. So, director's can be extremely eccentric, you can sculpt motion in animation in a way that you just can't do any other way. In any other performance medium.”

“I was not going to be an actor. I was an engineer in physics. That's what I did: I graduated with a physics degree, and I had become a little bit distressed that I'd have to work for somebody - anybody! And I thought, "I'm not going to make a mark on anything. If I can't express myself, then I don't know what the heck I'm going to do with this life." I think it was just one of those germs that said, "No, no, no, you've got to say things. You've got to tell people things. You've got to express your opinion in this life, because that's how you started."”

“This is the most important joke I've ever heard. Niels Bohr, the founder of Quantum Physics, had a friend to dinner. As the friend left, he noticed a horseshoe nailed above Bohr's front door. He said to Bohr, accusingly, "Niels, you're a great scientist. You can't believe in superstitions." Bohr answered, "I don't, but apparently it works anyway."As with confirmation bias, we tend to lean toward superstitions that benefit us.”

“The scientists who made the atomic bomb are, in my sense, people with a tragic destiny. You know, there was the US race with Nazi Germany and good evidence that the Germans were more advanced in nuclear physics, and we had to get the bomb first. But then there was the use of that dreadful weapon, or instrument of genocide, and many of the more sensitive scientists turned quickly into anti - nuclear people - and very effective ones.”

“I'm always reading many books at a time. It might be quite unorthodox, but what I do is, since I'm always surrounded with books, I'll read a page of physics, and then I'll read a chapter of a novel that I really love, and then I'll say, "Oh well, what does that mixture do in my head?" I adore reference books. I love encyclopedias. I also like just going back to original texts, because a lot of these self-help books today.”

“What does reflect reality very well is complexity theory, which comes from physics. I'm the one pioneering the idea of bringing it to capital markets. When you look at capital markets through the lens of complexity theory, you ask "what's the scale of the system?" Scale is a fancy word for size. What measures are you using? If you look at total debt, the concentration of assets in the five largest banks, what percentage of the total assets of the five largest banks are interconnected? What you see is a very densely connected, fragile system that could collapse at any moment.”

“Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.”