Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Broadly speaking, traditional physics has collapsed into two portions, truisms and geography.

Bertrand Russell

Physics too deals with mathematical concepts; however, these concepts attain physical content only by the clear determination of their relation to the objects of experience.

Albert Einstein

Physics must be interpreted in a way which tends toward idealism, and perception in a way which tends toward materialism.

Bertrand Russell

It is obvious that a man who can see, knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics must subdue the flights of our reason; they are the staff of the blind; no one can take a step without them; and to them and experience is due all that is certain in physics.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected--so entirely novel--so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions--as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears.

Edgar Allan Poe

The highest wisdom is established, not on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences, physics, history, chemistry, and the like, on which intellectual knowledge stumbles. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has one science, the science of the All, the universal science which explains all creation, and the place which man occupies in it.

I believe that all those to whom God has given the use of reason are bound to use it mainly to know Him and to know themselves. This is where I endeavored to begin my own research, and I can say that I would have been unable to find the foundation of physics had I not sought after them in this way In William R. Shea

René Descartes

First you must have faith in an eternal world independent of you; then you must have faith in your ability to perceive it, and finally you must try to explain it by means of concepts or mathematical constructions. But don't always accept traditional concepts without reexamining them. Even overthrow my relativity theory, if you find a better one.... You must believe that the world was created as a unified whole which is comprehensible to man. Of course, it's going to take an infinitely long time to investigate this unified creation. But to me that is the highest and most sacred duty—unifying physics. Simplicity is the criterion of the universe.

Albert Einstein

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man's own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.

I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was 'It won the fight!'

Albert Einstein

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.

René Descartes

Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.

Albert Einstein

Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes.

If there is one thing we can be sure enough of in physics it is that all time exists with equal reality.

Stephen Hawking

[Quantum theory] If this is correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science.

Albert Einstein

I still lose my temper dutifully about physics. But I no longer flap my wings — I only ruffle my feathers. The majority of fools remain invincible.

Albert Einstein

Scientific laws, when we have reason to think them accurate, are different in form from the common-sense rules which have exceptions: they are always, at least in physics, either differential equations or statistical averages.

Bertrand Russell

The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.
[Hawking adopted this statement from a remark made to him by his former post-doc, Nathan Myhrvold.]

Stephen Hawking

Physics is the attempt at the conceptual construction of a model of the real world and its lawful structure.

Albert Einstein

It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

Albert Einstein

The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.

Henry David Thoreau

Physics and perception are like two people on opposite sides of a brook which slowly widens as they walk; at first it is easy to jump across, but imperceptibly it grows more difficult, and at last a vast labor is required to get from one side to the other.

Bertrand Russell