Physics Quotes

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In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.

Murray Gell-Mann

I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions.

Richard A. Muller

Statistics reigns and revels in the very heart of Physics.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.

Nancy Cartwright

The electron has conquered Physics, and many worship the new idol rather blindly.

Lucien Poincaré

My starting point was rather the stability of matter, a pure miracle when considered from the standpoint of classical physics. By "stability" I mean that the same substances always have the same properties.

In physics experience can best be sought from mathematics and mechanics, chemistry, and anatomy; in medical practice experience derives most abundantly from the observations of diseases, and from more accurate histories and cures.

Friedrich Hoffmann

If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed up, that one will not be biology.

J. B. S. Haldane

If doing mathematics or science is looked upon as a game, then one might say that in mathematics you compete against yourself or other mathematicians; in physics your adversary is nature and the stakes are higher.

One feels that one has, at last in gravitational collapse, a phenomenon where general relativity dramatically comes into its own, and where its fiery marriage with quantum physics will be consummated.

John Archibald Wheeler

We live in the hope and the faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by and by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.

Thomas Henry Huxley

I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of the Secret, on an energetic level,

Einstein, in thus analyzing what is involved in making a judgment of simultaneity, and in seizing on the act of the observer as the essence of the situation, is actually adopting a new point of view as to what the concepts of physics should be, namely, the operational view.

Percy Williams Bridgman

If one knows physics for a distance only, if he hears merely strange names and mathematical formulae in it, he will, indeed, come to believe that it is an affair of the learned alone — ingeniously and wisely constructed, but without significance for men of other interests and problems.

Hans Reichenbach

All physicists agree that the problem of physics consists in tracing the phenomena of nature back to the simple laws of mechanics.

Physics is not a series of disconnected subjects, including Mechanics, Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity. It is, on the contrary, a body of well-organized truth, forming one great whole; illustrating, as do few other subjects, what Dickens called "the universal dove-tailedness of things."

Science has a beauty and uplifting spirit which rivals any of the other cultural attainments of humanity. This aesthetic response arose in a recent congressional hearing. When asked how particle physics contributes to the defense of our country, Robert Wilson replied that it makes the country worth defending.

In science, if the last 50 years were the age of physics, the next 50 years will be the age of biology.

A physics book, unlike a novel, not only has no happy ending, but has no real ending at all.

Jeremy Bernstein

Einstein's relativity did not speak to human values. Those were, or were not, relative for reasons unrelated to the physics of objects moving at near-light speed. Borrowing metaphors from the technical sciences could be a dangerous practice.

Physics has opened the eyes of mankind so that it can now see in a very new truth new worlds — a marvelous world of electrons, already quite well explored, which underlies our former world of atoms and molecules, a world of quanta, not yet well understood, which lies perhaps behind the ether.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, molded and conformed.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

Robert B. Leighton

On the ice rink I am communing with the fundamental laws of physics. At the instant of creation we believe that the Universe was symmetrical, it was pure, it was elegant. Without friction Newtonian laws are laid bare, simple, elegant and beautiful, pure, noble, elemental, just like it was at the beginning of time.

The mathematicians and physics men Have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, Never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, They invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space.

Robinson Jeffers