Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models, which were for them not products of the imagination, but representatives of real things.

the mathematical physicist... obtains much prestige from the physicists because they are impressed with the amount of mathematics he knows, and much prestige from the mathematicians, because they are impressed with the amount of physics he knows.

William Francis Gray Swann

Quantum physics presents a new and exciting worldview that challenges old concepts, such as deterministic trajectories of motion and causal continuity. If initial conditions do not forever determine an object's motion, if instead, every time we observe, there is a new beginning, then the world is creative at the base level.

The external world of physics has become a world of shadows.

Arthur Eddington

Organization is not something fundamentally mystical and unamenable to scientific attack, but rather the basic problem confronting the biologist... It is for us to investigate the nature of this biological organization, not to abandon it to the metaphysicians because the rules of physics do not seem to apply to it.

Thus was born the vast modern subject of nuclear physics, which now gives such fertile research problems to so many of the world's physicists and, incidentally, such headaches to so many of the world's statesmen.

Patrick Blackett

Modem physics is, indeed, not unlike a ship, drawing nearer to a goal not yet in sight, but so tossed about by the buffetings of experiment and working hypothesis that the passenger scarcely knows whether he is progressing or drifting.

"In physics," he said, "we plan. We plan months ahead, years ahead... You astronomers don't plan, you rush around like a chicken without a head. Observe and observe and observe and all shall be revealed unto you."

We all need to learn a new language for love - a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other's uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support.

Although of primary importance in all branches of physics and an indispensable conceptual tool of scientific thought, the notion of mass seems to elude all attempts at a fully comprehensive elucidation and a logical as well as scientifically unobjectionable definition.

It [physics] is less known, I suppose, than that of any other major science; and we who practice it scarcely dare avow ourselves as physicists in any group of laymen, for we know too well that if we do we shall be asked first to spell the word and then to define it!

Antaeus was the strongest person alive, invincible as long as he was in contact with his mother, the earth. Once he lost contact with the earth, he grew weak and was vanquished. Theories in physics are like that. They have to touch the ground for their strength.

Maurice Goldhaber

No part of mathematics or mathematical physics involves considerations so strange or so difficult to handle correctly, and there is no subject upon which opinions have been more freely hazarded by the ignorant, or rational dissent more unambiguously expressed by the learned.

Augustus De Morgan

Hope is a word one is unlikely to find in the literature of physics.

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

Research in physics has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that in the overwhelming majority of phenomena whose regularity and invariability have led to the formulation of the postulate of causality, the common element underlying the consistency observed is chance.

Erwin Schrödinger

It is probably no exaggeration to say that all of theoretical physics proceeds by analogy.

Jeremy Bernstein

Physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.

Anthony Standen

Modern Physics impresses us particularly with the truth of the old doctrine which teaches that there are realities existing apart from our sense-perceptions, and that there are problems and conflicts where these realities are of greater value for us than the richest treasures of the world of experience.

No matter how it looks to us, love never loses control; the laws of our relations are as honest and as exact as the laws of physics.

Getting into a new field of physics is like reading a Russian novel. There are a lot of names to cope with, and at first you wonder who's who.

Kenneth W. Ford

In physic, the wisest can do but little, and the ignorant can only do worse than nothing.

When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're speaking to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts.

Nature is far more wonderful and unconventional than anything we can evolve from our inner consciousness. The most far-reaching generalizations which may influence philosophy as well as revolutionize physics, may be suggested, nay, forced on the mind by the discovery of some trivial phenomenon.

A scorner of physic once said that nature and disease may be compared to two men fighting, the doctor to a blind man with a club, who strikes into the melee, sometimes hitting the disease, and sometimes hitting nature.

Thomas Henry Huxley