Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Arthur Eddington

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.

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

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

Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

So, I'm not the only one who believes that there is such a thing as "the law of gravity," and if it's a law, it can be violated. If you hit the ground at 120 mph from 1,000 feet, you will suffer the consequences of violating what physics. about. com calls the law of gravity.

In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.

Justus von Liebig

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.

The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.

Louis Althusser

Affliction is a divine diet which though it be not pleasing to mankind, yet almighty God hath often imposed it as a good, thought bitter, physic, to those children whose souls are dearest to him.

Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.

Richard Feynman

There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.

Anthony James Leggett

In mesoscopic physics, you really need to build up intuition, because it is not the world you know.

Carlo Beenakker

The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

How many black holes have we been up close and personal with?" Kosta countered. "All sorts of odd things happen near the event horizon, from huge tidal forces to variations in time. Personally, I'm voting on it having to do with gravity, either a polarization of the fields themselves or else something related to the time differential." I didn't know physics had become a democracy," Hanan murmered.

If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe.

It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.

If a woman has her PhD in physics, has mastered quantum theory, plays flawless Chopin, was once a cheerleader, and is now married to a man who plays baseball, she will forever be "former cheerleader married to star athlete."

Maryanne Ellison Simmons

From the point of view of physics, all of us are rebels because we spend our lives actively subverting the forces of gravity and entropy, two of the fundamental laws to which all earthly matter must ultimately answer.

Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics.

Julius Thomas Fraser

Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, 'You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers.'

Going to the moon is not a matter of physics but of economics.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.