Physicist Quotations

Rossi was the first to describe another system working with valves in parallel; it has the advantage that it can easily be extended to coincidences between more than two events, and is therefore predominantly used today.

After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise.

It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

I think the one thing that most stands out is that my father always did what he believed to be the right thing to do and he always told us that we had to go our own way even if he disagreed.

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.

I had therefore, no hesitation in giving all the information I had, even though occasionally I tried to concentrate mainly on giving information about the results of my own work.

So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities.

When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.

I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.

This result was confirmed by different researchers using various experimental arrangements.

Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.

During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result.

Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere.

Shortly afterwards my father told me that he might be going into the Eastern Zone of Germany. At that time my own mind was closer to his than it had ever been before, because he also believed that they are at least trying to build a new world.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.

The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

To a physicist, we have the 'I' word, the I-word is 'impossible.' That's dangerous.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

My argument was that we could not stop Hitler by cooperating with other bourgeois parties but that only a united working class could stop him.

My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions.

So I think that the issue of how consciousness relates to the physical world is all tied up with morality but we have a lot to learn on that one.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

I went first to France and then to England where I studied and at the same time I tried to make a serious study of the basic Marxist philosophy.

Our arrangement therefore consisted of two needle counters, past the common front wall of which, without touching it, swept a beam of X-rays.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.

Physics is much too hard for physicists.

During conversion, the newly formed nucleus is not always immediately in the ground state, but is at times in one of the possible activated states.

I've been married for many years to a physicist who's been about as supportive and encouraging of my work as any partner could be.

Film consumption however was so enormous that our laboratory with the film strips strung up for drying sometimes resembled an industrial laundry.

The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. – Niels Bohr,1885-1962, Danish Physicist

Entire lights rays - you see if you made space, each of whose points represented an entire light ray, you'd find that space had five dimensions.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

I like science fiction movies, but I think they are useful for giving us ideas and I think science fiction is very good at giving ideas.

In my view, this was a singular event in the history of nanotechnology, ... It not only created a whole new field of 'fullerene chemistry,' it immediately made feasible the notion of making things from the bottom up, just as physicist Richard Feynman had predicted 50 years earlier.

In my view, this was a singular event in the history of nanotechnology. It not only created a whole new field of 'fullerene chemistry,' it immediately made feasible the notion of making things from the bottom up, just as physicist Richard Feynman had predicted 50 years earlier.

The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proven to have their counterparts in the world of fact.

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.

The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .

The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is,

The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist. These are scientists who are making the future in their laboratories.

When the time comes to change a paradigm--to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another--the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.

Without perceiving things through the old filter of past conditioning and conceptualization, one can sense the universe is intensely alive. Even so-called inanimate objects - I often pick up little objects and just look at them and sense that they are alive. Physicists actually confirm that what we perceive as dead matter is not dead at all. Everything is an intensely alive energy field. That aliveness is only an aspect of the aliveness or life that I am.

To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.

There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Maxwell is the physicist's physicist.

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.