Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Katrina: I don't know what laws of physics are involved, but if you fill a gym with teenagersand tell them to stare at one object, heat is actually produced. I half expected tospontaneously combust.

Suzanne Selfors

Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.

Since Galileo's time, physics has achieved its greatest success by rejecting all teleological methods.

Nowadays whenever enthusiasts meet together to discuss theoretical physics the talk sooner or later turns in a certain direction. You leave them conversing on their special problems or the latest discoveries; but return after an hour and it is any odds that they will have reached an allengrossing topic - the desperate state of their ignorance.

Arthur Eddington

The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulations a mathematics that gets continually more advanced.

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

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."

Constantly and, if it be possible, on the occasion of every impression on the soul, apply to it the principles of Physic, of Ethic, and of Dialectic.

Marcus Aurelius

Toward the end of the last century, many physicists felt that the mathematical description of physics was getting ever more complicated. Instead, the mathematics involved has become ever more abstract, rather than more complicated. The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated. He also appears to like group theory.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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.

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

All the qualities of the atom of modem physics are derived, it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all, i.e., every type of visual conception we might wish to design is eo ipso, faulty.

Werner Heisenberg

Only questions about the results of experiments have a real significance and it is only such questions that theoretical physics has to consider.

When a thing behaves as if it were alive, physics loses interest in it and hands it over to another section; for it is incompetent to deal with motions attributable to spontaneity and free will.

As far as medicine uses the principles of physics, it can be properly called a science; as far as it relies on practice, it can be called an art.

Friedrich Hoffmann

Physics is not a finished logical system. Rather, at any moment it spans a great confusion of ideas, some that survive like folk epics from the heroic periods of the past, and others that arise like utopian novels from our dim premonitions of a future grand synthesis.

Steven Weinberg

How far would people get in physics if discovery was described as disgusting - "Your formula is disgusting and filthy"? Not very far.

William S. Burroughs

The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

I walked on, musing with myself... whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning