Physics Quotations

Physics is a hobby of mine, as much as a person of limited intelligence can understand physics.

Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

I don't think Brian Cox does 'The Wonders of the Solar System' because he believes the world would be a better place if people understood about the rings of Saturn; I just think he finds physics extremely interesting. It brings him joy, and he wants to spread the love. I feel the same about economics.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: 'Be comforted, you and they shall live again.'

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.

I got into physics through pop science and quantum science and ended up being such a quantum groupie.

The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.

Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

In 1952, I was appointed Professor at the University of Bonn and Director of the Physics Institute, with very good students waiting for a thesis advisor.

I read a book called 'The Tao of Physics' by Fritjof Capra that pointed out the parallels between quantum physics and eastern mysticism. I started to feel there was more to reality than conventional science allowed for and some interesting ideas that it hadn't got round to investigating, such as altered states of consciousness.

Quantum physics is a bit of a passion of mine. It's extraordinary. There's a branch of mathematics that is based on lunacy, and that's wonderful.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Quantum physics forms the foundation of chemistry, explaining how molecules are held together. It describes how real solids and materials behave and how electricity is conducted through them... It enabled the development of transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, LEDs, digital cameras and all the modern gadgetry that surrounds us.

Well, I'm leaning probably toward the sciences like physics.

Physics is the most basic part of science and, of course, math. It gives you insight into everything - a foundation, I should say, to understand nature and the universe.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.

Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.

An hour or two spent in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day pass busily.

The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.

Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong,

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist.

Acceleration is finite, I think, according to some laws of physics.

We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics.

The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.

The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

Just the actual physics of putting it all together, you know, the latter period is actually quite fragmented in terms of the licenses and all those things so it makes a compilation of the full twenty years really a technical minefield.

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus.

There is no way to physically always be there for your children and always be at the office and always be present for your significant other and then take care of yourself. The laws of physics necessitate that somebody or some thing is going to get the short end of the stick.

I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It's the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter comes from.

My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

I took physics, and lo and behold, there's a lot of physics in 'Lost.' I think for most people, liberal arts educations are more abstract, but for me, it's been a chance to apply the things I've learned more directly. I also took some Folklore and Mythology classes, and I think that a lot of that influenced me.

I was always good at math and science and physics.

Government is like physics, you know - for every action, there's a reaction.

Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.

Today's particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar - and they had the ability to investigate it.

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn't make it work.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

At school, I got into the whole CB thing, hiding a transceiver in my study-bedroom with which I'd make appointments to meet girls in town. I wasn't good enough at physics to take it much further than fun, but I suppose there was a need to communicate.

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.

My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.

Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

I'm doing physics because I'm curious about how it works - full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, don't worry about whether somebody is going to be able to do an experiment next week, just figure it out.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.

Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

The life force knows exactly what it takes to keep any particular living organism - any organism - alive. Anything in manifestation, for that matter. Even a rock is a manifestation of some sort, and you know, in physics and quantum physics, they know a rock is not dead.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability.

I had a difficult time getting my arms around Einstein's work, even when I was a physics major at one of the top universities in India.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw - isn't that wonderful - so I made up a false name.