Physics Quotes

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Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you.

Albert Goldbarth

I am convinced that the spectrum of all chemical elements can be obtained... from quantum theory in a unique manner without physics by boneheaded calculation.

Werner Heisenberg

Physics progresses not by revolutions, which do away with all that went before, but rather by evolutions, which exploit the best about what is already understood. Newton's laws will continue to be as true a million years from now as they are today, no matter what we discover at the frontiers of science.

Lawrence M. Krauss

It [Aristotelian physics ] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom...

Herbert Butterfield

It does not take an idea so long to become "classical" in physics as it does in the arts.

Physics refers to ether, electrons, molecules, intrinsically incapable of direct observation.

Alfred North Whitehead

Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

Jacob Bronowski

It would doubtless be exceedingly rash, and certainly very presumptuous, to seek to predict the future which may be reserved for physics. The role of prophet is not a scientific one, and the most firmly established precisions of to-day may be overthrown by the reality of to-morrow.

Lucien Poincaré

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

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.

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

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

Peter Mere Latham

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

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.

They are to astronomy what atoms are to physics. Each galaxy is a stellar system somewhat like our Milky Way, and isolated from its neighbors by nearly empty space. In popular terms, each galaxy is a separate universe unto itself.

The problem of physics is how the actual phenomena, as observed with the help of our sense organs aided by instruments, can be reduced to simple notions which are suited for precise measurement and used of the formulation of quantitative laws.

I only seek to adopt in physics a point of view that need not be changed the moment our glance is carried over into the domain of another science; for ultimately, all must form one whole.

The boundaries between chemistry, biology, physics and medicine are rapidly disappearing. Only a comprehensive understanding of the chemical and physical processes in our cells and organ systems will yield the insights needed to develop rational approaches to the prevention and treatment of disease.

"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.

Physics in antiquity remained closely connected with philosophy, and was predominantly concerned with the philosophical category of the "why," rather than the scientific category of the "how."

Ludwig Edelstein

Physics proves to us the impossibility of perpetual motion among visible, tangible bodies, at the same time that it reveals to us a world where perpetual motion is the rule — the world of molecules and atoms.

As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

Richard Feynman

If we accept a departure from the standard laws of physics, we might do away with dark matter.

Mordehai Milgrom

Truth is a whole, and the truth of physics will be found to link on and to be but part of that larger truth which is the nature and the character of the universe.