Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

The beauty in the laws of physics is the fantastic simplicity that they have.

John Archibald Wheeler

No matter how compelling or elegant it is, a theory of physics must be subjected to experimental verification or it differs little from medieval theology.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

We live in an era when it seems legitimate to try everything conceivable within the known laws of physics, particularly in the absence of data.

Geoffrey Burbidge

Accordingly, biology apes the manners of physics. It is orthodox to hold that there is nothing in biology but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex circumstances.

Alfred North Whitehead

Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly.

Wernher von Braun

Physics shares with mathematics the advantages of succinct description and of brief, compendious definition, which precludes confusion, even in ideas where, with no apparent burdening of the brain, hosts of others are contained.

Mathematics is the natural language of theoretical physics. It is the irreplaceable instrument for the penetration of realms of physical phenomena far beyond the ordinary experience upon which conventional language is based.

Julian Schwinger

Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are.

William Poundstone

It is a paradox in mathematics and physics that we have no good model for the teaching of models.

Hartley Rogers Jr.

The modern history of instruments and the patterns of their use may lack the glamour of the history of our over arching theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, these bubbling, sparking, clanking devices remain the weft and the warp of physics.

As we explore physics at higher and higher energy, revealing its structure at shorter and shorter distances, we discover more and more symmetry.

In order for physics to be useful to other sciences in a theoretical way, other than in the invention of instruments, the science in question must supply to the physicist a description of the object in a physicist's language.

Richard Feynman