Physics Quotes

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Everything we are given or learn or possess in any real sense — the ability to play Beethoven sonata, write books, understand the principles of physics — is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves.

Phyllis Theroux

The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

Jackson Pollock

This elegant generalization is mathematically very appealing; but physics means facing facts. You should take up case by case.

Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan

Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died. But here's a happier age: for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so.

Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe.

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. … Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness... Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

Use law and physic only for necessity; they that use them otherwise abuse themselves unto weak bodies, and light purses; they are good remedies, bad businesses, and worse recreations.

Francis Quarles

Hypothesis Of Molecular Vortices. In thermodynamics as well as in other branches of molecular physics, the laws of phenomena have to a certain extent been anticipated, and their investigation facilitated, by the aid of hypotheses as to occult molecular structures and motions with which such phenomena are assumed to be connected. The hypothesis which has answered that purpose in the case of thermodynamics, is called that of "molecular vortices," or otherwise, the "centrifugal theory of elasticity.

William John Macquorn Rankine

You believe in God? Dude. Only God could have created physics.

Karen Marie Moning

Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that 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.

The modern scientific worldview with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a "flipside," a complementary set of views which it generates as its train. And this is its misology, sophistry, its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. There is thus a quite literal type of schizophrenia in the world bequeathed to us by the Cartesians. It is, on the one hand, hyper-rational; it seeks to extend the purview of mathematical physics throughout the universe. On the other hand, it relegates the world in which the physicist himself dwells, the unique world of humanity and its communities, to the junkpile of the irrational. We who know so much are prohibited from knowing ourselves.

Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with the economic interpretation of the complex and incompletely known facts of experience, and lead one a very little way towards establishing useful results.

John Maynard Keynes

It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

A good deal of my research work in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problems, but simply examining mathematical quantities of a kind that physicists use and trying to get them together in an interesting way regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck.

Physics tries to discover the pattern of events which controls the phenomena we observe. But we can never know what this pattern means or how it originates; and even if some superior intelligence were to tell us, we should find the explanation unintelligible.

Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right.

One can see clearly some ambivalence in Dirac's attitudes... On the one hand, he has repeated many, many times his conviction that beauty in the fundamental equations of physics has priority... On the other hand... we see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon.

Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

Although the classic theoretical foundation of distance measurement in physics is the 'rigid rod', nearly all distances in surveying, whether terrestrial or celestial, are made to depend on the properties of light. The two simplest properties so employed are the principle of propogation in straight lines and the principle that the intensity of light diminishes inversely as the square of the distance.

Gerald James Whitrow

I am a successful lecturer in physics for popular audiences. The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are 'entertained' enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before. One must have faith in the subject and in people's interest in it.

Richard Feynman

Physic, it may be urged, is solely concerned with the objects and events of inanimate nature, while a general philosophy, if it is to be at all satisfactory, must embrace the whole of physical and intellectual life and must deal with questions of the soul, including the highest problems of ethics.