Physics Quotes

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In the last fifty years physics has exerted a more powerful beneficial influence on the intellectual, economic and social life of the world than has been exerted in a comparable time by any other agency in history. Its influence has far exceeded that of wars, political alignment or social theories.

Karl Taylor Compton

It is as true in morals as in physics that all force is imperishable; therefore the consequences of a human action never cease.

Tennessee Celeste Claflin

Things happen faster in physics than in the book publishing business.

Richard Feynman

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?

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.

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

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.

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself — nature does it for you.

On being asked what he meant by the beauty of a mathematical theory of physics, Dirac replied that if the questioner was a mathematician then he did not need to be told, but were he not a mathematician then nothing would be able to convince him of it.

In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

Physics doesn't have to have any use. It just is.

Robert A. Heinlein

The importance of infinite processes for the practical exigencies of technical life can hardly be overemphasized. Practically all applications of arithmetic to geometry, mechanics, physics and even statistics involve these processes directly and indirectly.

One of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible.

Léon Brillouin

The ultimate problem of physics is to reduce matter by analysis to its lowest condition of divisibility, and force to its simplest manifestations, and then by synthesis to construct from these elements the world as it stands.

If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers, intervenes to save cancer patients or helps evolution over difficult jumps, forgives sins or dies for them? Snake Oil and Holy Water

Richard Dawkins

In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.

Results of measurements are the subject-matter of physics; and the moral of the theory of relativity is that we can only comprehend what the physical quantities stand for if we first comprehend what they are.

Arthur Eddington

The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science.

In Physics... as in every other science, common sense alone is not supreme; there must also be a place for Reason.

A rainbow described in the symbolism of physics is a band of aethereal vibrations arranged in systematic order of wavelength from about -000040 cm to -000072 cm.

Arthur Eddington

Reading, writing, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, physics, and more were all at one time deep occult secrets. Today, many of these things are taught to children before they begin school. THE OCCULTISM OF THE PAST BECOMES THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE.

Donald Michael Kraig

Gertrude Stein said of modern art, "A picture may seem extraordinarily strange to you and after some time not only does it not seem strange but it is impossible to find what there was in it that was strange." Quantum physics isn't like that. The longer you look at it, the stranger it gets.

Physics has ascended to summits hitherto visible only to philosophers, whose gaze has, however, not always been free from metaphysical haziness.