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Physics Quotes

“In the last four days I have got the (results) given by Tantalum, Chromium, Manganese, Iron , Nickel, Cobalt and Copper ... The chief result is that ... the result for any metal (is) quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of.”

ScienceElementsScientistPhysicsChemistryAtomsEarly DeathPioneerAtomic TheoryPioneering Scientist
Author:Henry Moseley
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“At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the participants' favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation came in first with thirteen votes, while the many-worlds interpretation came in second with eight. Another nine votes were scattered among other alternatives. Most interesting, eighteen votes were cast for "None of the above/undecided." And these are the experts.”

PhysicsQuantumEvrenMultiverseBilimKuantumFizik
Book:From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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“That day, the great mind in neuroscience Michael A. Persinger, who is now a good friend of mine, made me realize that it was no other field of Science but Neuroscience that held the key to solving the quintessential problems of consciousness. He coaxed me into the science of the neurons and the rest as you know is history. Without Persinger, Naskar and Neuroscience would never have been linked together. Imbued with new knowledge, confidence and excessive curiosity, I officially turned my attention to one of the loftiest goals of modern science - understanding the biological nature of the human mind. That day on, I officially got into the world of Neuroscience.”

PsychologyPhysicsNeuroscienceNeuropsychologyScientistsScience Of MindNeuroscientists
Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”

MindPastScienceTimeUniverseNatureSpacePerfectionIntelligencePhysicsAstronomyCertaintyDataAnalysisFree WillHuman MindEyesPresentComprehensionNaturalismDeterminismMotionOmniscienceFormulaLack Of Free Will
Author:Pierre Simon de Laplace
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“The fireworks went on for nearly half an hour, great pulsing strobes, fiery dandelions and starbursts of light brightening both sky and water. It was hard to tell which was reality and which was reflection, as if there were two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously—one in space-time, mused Max, and the other in time-space.”

OceanPhysicsCelebrationFloridaMirrorFireworksSpace TimeMirroringLightsParallel UniverseNew Year S EveParallel RealitiesTime SpaceDewey LarsonReciprocal SystemSciencce Fiction
Book:Snooze: A Story of Awakening
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“.... attempts to combine these two forces with the strong nuclear force into what is called a grand unified theory (GUT). This title is rather an exaggeration: the resultant theories are not all that grand, nor are they fully unified, as they do not include gravity. Nor are they really complete theories, because they contain a number of parameters whose values cannot be predicted from a theory but have to be chosen to fit in with experiment. Nevertheless, they may be a step toward a complete, fully unified theory.”

PhysicsScience HumorGrand Unified Theory
Book:A Briefer History of Time
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“Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 80 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.”

PhysicsBlack HolesStephen HawkingScience HumorBlack Hole Quotes
Book:A Briefer History of Time
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“The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be 'recycled'. It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole! Even the types of particles that were eventually emitted by the black hole would in general be different from those that made up the astronaut: the only feature of the astronaut that would survive would be his mass or energy.”

HumorPhysicsAstronautBlack HolesScience HumorSpace Humor
Book:A Brief History of Time
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“Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to detect particles always detect particles; experiments designed to detect waves always detect waves. No experiment shows the electron behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time.”

PhysicsQuantum PhysicsQuantum MechanicsQuantum TheoryHeisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Book:In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
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“Henry Adams, the reluctant tourist of 1860, pondering the forty-foot dynamos in the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, sensed with alarm their 'moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.' He saw 'only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.' Physics was occupied with a 'supersensual world' of 'chance collisions' - physics was 'stark mad in metaphysics.' The pragmatic and human-scaled thinking that had sustained the fond narratives of nineteenth-century historians seemed feckless, disoriented.”

TechnologyPhysicsHenry Adams
Book:A History of Art History
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“Another force, which is not a force at all but is equally important, is the "force" of the Nonbeing, the force of the Nothing, the force of Emptiness, or the absolute vacuum. Without this “force,” space and time would not be possible. We must also state that time is impossible without space. In this sense, we treat time as a feature or property of space.”

MatterTimeEnergySpacePhysicsDejan StojanovicUniversal MindUniversal Being
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Time is not possible without space. Everything beyond the “physical” world is either endless or eternal. Absolute void is endless and, therefore, nonexistent. Absolute void is space without space. In absolute space, every point is the same point. Absolute space is pointless and spaceless. A pointless point is out of space or place.”

TimeSpaceMassPhysicsInfinityDejan StojanovicUniversal MindMotionPhilosophy Of Dejan Stojanovic
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Стаття ’т Гофта, яка на кілька місяців випередила мою, чомусь залишилася майже непоміченою. Частково це пов’язано з її назвою «Розмірна редукція у квантовій гравітації». Термін «розмірна редукція» є вузькоспеціалізованим. У фізиці, пов’язаній із технікою, він уживається дещо в іншому значенні, ніж у ’т Гофта. Я спробував зробити так, щоби мою статтю не спіткала така ж доля, і назвав її «Світ як голограма».”

PhysicsBlack HoleTitleScience Communication
Book:Війна чорної діри
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“It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.”

ScienceUniversePhysicsDesirableEntropyDissipationClausiusRudolf ClausiusRudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius
Book:Sketch Of Thermodynamics
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“... might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think that universe is like. (....) a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, 'real' or 'imaginary' time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.”

TimePhysicsReal TimeImaginary Time
Book:A Brief History of Time
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“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. [Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]”

ScienceDiscoveryPhysicsAtomsNobel PrizeNobel LaureateIncredibleNuclear PhysicsAtomic Science
Author:Ernest Rutherford
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“That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! … [T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.”

SciencePhysicsChemistryFascismPrimo Levi
Book:The periodic table
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“The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world.”

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Author:Victor J. Stenger
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“Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.) {A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'}”

HumorScienceAtheismIslamPhysicsProphetMuslimMuhammadAllahReligious ViewsHeisenbergWerner HeisenbergDiracPaul DiracPaul Am Dirac
Author:Wolfgang Pauli
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“Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide according to Gatterman was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very different from following Artusi's recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. 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 or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West – Archimedes and Euclid.”

SciencePhysicsChemistry
Book:The periodic table
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“Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?”

ScienceChancePhysicsBiologyProbabilityA Priori
Book:Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology
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“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely). . . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”

LifeScienceKnowledgePracticeArgumentCriticalPhysicsObservationBiologyChemistryInvestigationTestingWorldviewDetectivesMethodologyNatural ScienceDefinitionExperimentHistoriansEmpiricalCogencyFallibilism
Author:Alan Sokal
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“The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]”

ScienceEducationStudyPhysicsAtomsOxfordCambridgeNucleusErnest RutherfordRutherfordC P SnowBaron C P SnowBaron SnowCharles Percy Snow
Book:Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems and the Human World
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“[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.] Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah. ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe.”

ScienceUniverseUnderstandingPhysicsQuantum PhysicsPublicBenefitParticle PhysicsLarge Hadron ColliderAtom Smasher
Author:Michio Kaku
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