Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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.

Physics is narrow, precise, and simple in a manner such that history, sociology, psychology, or the study of literature are broad, hazy, and difficult.

The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry.

Claud William Wright

To open our eyes to the true nature of the universe has always been one of physics' primary purposes.

The laws of physics are governed by a process of intellectual natural selection. When they make correct predictions they survive. When they make incorrect predictions they become extinct. Physicists then look for new laws that do not make incorrect predictions.

Whatever may be time de jure, the Astronomer Royal's time is time de facto. His time permeates every corner of physics.

Arthur Eddington

Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection.

Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.

If you want to do serious physics, sometime you just have to learn it.

Rabindra Mohapatra

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.

David Ray Griffin

Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory — and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.

Oskar Morgenstern

A man cannot have a better guide than himself, nor any physic better than a regular life.

Daniel Bernoulli has been called the father of mathematical physics.

Eric Temple Bell

Should we be prepared to see some day a new structure for the foundations of physics that does away with time? In Paul Davies

John Archibald Wheeler

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.

Students judge how well they might do in a chemistry course from knowing how peers, who performed comparably to them in physics, fared in chemistry

It [relativity] was not a discovery of an outlying island, but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas of the greatest importance to some of the most fundamental questions connected with physics.

Dying dinosaurs and Martian dust storms, atmospheric physics and smoky fires in Brazil — important ideas can have the unlikeliest provenance. It is unwise to assume that any course of study of exploration is irrelevant.

John Noble Wilford

I find myself confronted with the task of settling by decisive experiments a question of interest in physics, namely, whether water can be changed into earth, as was thought by the old philosophers, and still is thought by some chemists of the day.

Antoine Lavoisier

Science should have no less lofty a goal. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.

Leon M. Lederman

The advance in our knowledge of physics is largely due to the application to it of mathematics, and every year it becomes more difficult for an experimenter to make any mark in the subject unless he is also a mathematician.

W. W. Rouse Ball