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Physics Quotes

“Maybe somewhere telepaths walked the Earth, but I wasn't one of them. In the process, I began to realize that the wondrous exploits of telepaths were probably impossible--at least without outside assistance. But in the years that followed, I also slowly learned another lesson: to fathom the greatest secrets in the universe, one did not need telepathic or superhuman abilities. One just had to have an open, determined, and curious mind. In particular, in order to understand whether the fantastic devices of science fiction are possible, you have to immerse yourself in advanced physics. To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics.”

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Book:The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
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“Using the tools developed by physicists in the last century, biologists in this century are poised to enact their own scientific revolution. Time will tell whether years from now another book will describe how "biologists changed the future." But on thing is for sure---we will not be able to embrace and participate in that future without the discipline, curiosity, questioning, and reasoning that science requires.”

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Book:The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World
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“The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naive physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his [Viktor's] mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of "a man," and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability? Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates. But no! No! And again no! Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones! Man and Fascism cannot co-exist. If Fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.”

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Book:Life and Fate
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“[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought in accordance with these principles - yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not merely ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries.”

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Book:Critique of pure reason
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“Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.”

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Book:Variety of Men
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“Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.”

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Book:More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian
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“[Concerning] phosphorescent bodies, and in particular to uranium salts whose phosphorescence has a very brief duration. With the double sulfate of uranium and potassium ... I was able to perform the following experiment: One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion in two sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours. When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative. One can repeat the same experiments placing a thin pane of glass between the phosphorescent substance and the paper, which excludes the possibility of chemical action due to vapors which might emanate from the substance when heated by the sun's rays. One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salts. [Although the sun is irrelevant, and he misinterprets the role of phosphorescence, he has discovered the effect of radioactivity.]”

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Author:Antoine Henri Becquerel
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“His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected.”

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Author:Walter Lewin
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“We did it all for fun, obviously; because there was nothing in it for us, as far as earning went. When the elements began to be formed, we started evaluating our bets in atoms of the rarer elements, and this is where I made a mistake. I had seen that the rarest of all was technetium, so I started betting tech-netium and whining, and hoarding: I built up a capital of technetium. I hadn't foreseen it was an unstable element that dissolved in radiations: suddenly I had to start all over again, from zero.”

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Book:Cosmicomics
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“No language speaks to computers better than code, No language speaks of matter better than physics. No language speaks of mind better than neurology, No language speaks pattern better than mathematics. No language speaks of thought better than philosophy, No language speaks of emotion better than poetry. No language speaks of justice better than sociology, No language speaks of behavior better than psychology.”

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Book:Insan HimalayanoÄŸlu: It's Time to Defect
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“When I was young, I thought it was thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in St. Paul's High School, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice of the thunder itself is just a noise. The lightning is the poise. I learnt to take the course of my life, not by violence but rather with intelligence.”

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Author:Israelmore Ayivor
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“The density of your destiny is the product of the mass of your visions and the volume your impacts occupy!”

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Author:Israelmore Ayivor
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“Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works.”

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Book:The Quotable Feynman
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“Numbers, furthermore as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential.”

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Book:Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics
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“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.”

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Book:The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?
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“Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind. Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ... To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples.”

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Author:Jonathan Black, Mark Booth
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“God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).”

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Author:Paul Davies
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“The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century. Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity. We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology.”

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Book:Physics, the Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond
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“The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....”

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Book:The Scientific Imagination: With a New Introduction
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“We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.”

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Author:Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow
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“True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.”

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Book:The Charm of Physics: Collected Essays of Sheldon Glashow
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“To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.”

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Book:Shelter Island II: Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics
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“In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.”

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Book:Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the Existence and Operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio
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“Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.”

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Book:QED and the Men Who Made It
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“The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant. ... An expanded form of the constant leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, ...”

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Book:The Enigmatic Electron: A Doorway to Particle Masses
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“The prime number 137 had continuously occupied Pauli's mind. It is an approximate value for a constant appearing in the fine structure theory of atomic spectra which in its theoretical expression ties together electromagnetism, relativity and quantum theory. Pauli saw the fine structure theory of spectra as a key in understanding the deepest contemporary problems of theoretical physics. For that reason the number 137 possessed a mysterious attraction for him.”

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Book:Beyond the Atom: The Philosophical Thought of Wolfgang Pauli
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“In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.”

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Book:No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli
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“But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the "fine-structure constant," .... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.”

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Book:Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
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“Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula "served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass.”

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Book:Making 20th Century Science: How Theories Became Knowledge
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