Physics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Jeremy Bernstein

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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

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.

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

Arthur Eddington

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 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

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.

Physics... is much too hard for physicists.

So the quantum, fiery creative force of modern physics, has burst forth in eruption after eruption and for all we know the next may be the greatest of all.

John Archibald Wheeler

Anything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence that there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology or a new law of physics.

When we pass from ordinary sight to scientific vision, how subtle and ethereal matter becomes! What pictures modern physics gives us of a restless activity suggestive of life!

John Arthur Thomson

The practice of physic is jostled by quacks on the one side, and by science on the other.

Peter Mere Latham

Whatever may be time de jure, the Astronomer Royal's time is time de facto. His time permeates every corner of physics.

It is undeniable that mathematicians, with a self-denying ordinance about coefficients, can thus attain remarkable criteria, and are able to anticipate definite results; but we need not seek to engraft their modes of expression on the real world of physics.

Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

Walter Savage Landor