Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Among the mere talkers, so far as mathematics are concerned, are to be ranked three out of four of those who apply mathematics to physics, who, wanting a tool only, are very impatient of everything which is not of direct aid to the actual methods which are in their hands.

Augustus De Morgan

If atoms obey spooky rules, and we are made of atoms, why don't we follow the same rules? The answer to the quandary must lie on the theoretical ladder that leads from the laboratory down into the world of atoms, precisely at the missing rung between the two regimes, where classical physics loses its relevance and quantum mechanics takes over.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all?...the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton.

John Horgan (journalist)

Physics brings the ferment bands into existence but organic chemistry is necessary for the identification or creation of these bands.... Indeed, the ferment substance - though being so near to us - is, like the substance of the stars, inaccessible for us.

Otto Heinrich Warburg

Mathematics is merely an auxiliary of science, an appendix to Physics.

Gabriel Jean Edmond Séailles

Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics.... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics.... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.

It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like results.

Neutrino physics is largely an art of learning a great deal by observing nothing.

Physics defines itself as the science devoted to discovering, developing and refining those aspects of reality that are amenable to mathematical analysis.

Physics is a science which must be proved with honest effort. One can, perhaps, present a subject in such a manner that an audience of laymen may be convinced erroneously that it has understood the lecture. This, however, means a furthering a superficial knowledge, which is worse and more dangerous than none at all.

Wilhelm Röntgen

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Relativity physics has shifted the moving present out from the superstructure of the universe, into the minds of human beings, where it belongs.

However the development proceeds in detail, the path so far traced by the quantum theory indicates that an understanding of those still unclarified features of atomic physics can only be acquired by foregoing visualization and objectification to an extent greater than that customary hitherto. We have probably no reason to regret this, because the thought of the great epistemological difficulties with which the visual atom concept of earlier physics had to contend gives us the hope that the abstracter atomic physics developing at present will one day fit more harmoniously into the great edifice of Science.

Werner Heisenberg

The chain of cause and effect could be quantitatively verified only if the whole universe were considered as a single system — but then physics has vanished, and only a mathematical scheme remains. The partition of the world into observing and observed system prevents a sharp formulation of the law of cause and effect.

Werner Heisenberg

In physics and chemistry, like all other branches of science, there is never a sharp line separating pseudo-scientific speculation from the theories of competent men.

Physics begins by facing a mystery. It transforms the mystery into a puzzle. It solves the puzzle. And it finds itself facing a new mystery.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

The attitude of Aristotelian physics toward lawfulness takes a new direction. So long as lawfulness remained limited to such processes as occurred repeatedly in the same way, it is evident, not only that the young physics still lacked the courage to extend the principle to all physical phenomena, but also that the concept of lawfulness still had a fundamentally historic, a temporally particular, significance. Stress was laid not upon the general validity which modem physics understands by lawfulness, but upon the events in the historically given world which displayed the required stability. The highest degree of lawfulness, beyond mere frequency, was characterized by the idea of the always eternal.

The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

Daniel H. Wilson

The science of physics does not only give us [mathematicians] an opportunity to solve problems, but helps us to discover the means of solving them, and it does this in two ways: it leads us to anticipate the solution and suggests suitable lines of argument.

Henri Poincaré

The task of an epistemologist in contemporary physics is therefore a little like that of the psychoanalyst: to detect the remnants of classical thought beneath the verbal denials and conscious rejections.

There is not a "pure" science. By this I mean that physics impinges on astronomy, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology on the other. And not only does each support neighbors, but derives sustenance from them. The same can be said of chemistry. Biology is, perhaps, the example par excellence today of an "impure" Science.

The reason that I am now almost completely swimming in physical waters is because here at the moment as a pure mathematician I am the only feeling heart among the wraiths. So for now... in order to have points in common with other mortals, I have surrendered myself to magic — that is to say, physics.

A crumb is a great thing: If you break a crumb in half, you don't get two half-crumbs, you get two crumbs. Doesn't that violate some law of physics?

On the side of physics, there were a few key figures in Oxford who realized, in all probability unlike the majority of their colleagues in the physics department, that physics without interpretation is only part of the story, and that theories like quantum mechanics need careful foundational reflection.