Quotes by Physicists - Page 11

Kind words produce their images on men's souls.
Blaise Pascal
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.
Sean Carroll
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
Albert Einstein
We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.
Max Born
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
Albert Einstein
Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?
Richard Feynman
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
Francis William Aston
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
Albert Einstein
Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.
William Keepin
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
Blaise Pascal
Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.
Nikola Tesla
Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Albert-László Barabási
The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
Stephen Hawking
For me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device. In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us . . . In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.
Andrei Linde
For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now.
Charles P. Enz
The past and present are only our means the future is always our end. Thus we never really live but only hope to live.
Blaise Pascal
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
Max Planck
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
Nikola Tesla
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie
It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.
Peter Guthrie Tait
The invisible fuel for this healing process is our heartfelt compassion and loving presence and the sincerity of the collective intention that we bring to it.
William Keepin
No one escapes gender conditioning. Most of us unwittingly carry the cultural gender shadow into our important relationships, and we end up in struggles with our partners, family members, friends, and colleagues that aren’t really about us as individual. When women and men do gender reconciliation work in community, they begin to see the power of this cultural baggage in a new light. They realise the prevalence of overarching social patterns and conditioning in much of their experience – and comprehend that, in this larger context, they are not alone in what happened to them.
William Keepin
To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves; magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude; asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and floras and faunas melt in air: the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy—the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena—are but the modulations of its rhythm.
John Tyndall
Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words
C.P. Snow
It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.
Alan Guth
How you get to know is what I want to know.
Richard Feynman
So, look at the world around you, and if you notice things that don't seem right - injustices, inefficiencies, or just oddities - investigate them further. Think about why and how those things might happen and what you could do to change them for the better. Test your ideas by trying new things, making more observations, refining your models, and repeating the process. And when you find something that works to explain or improve your situation, tell everyone about it, so we can all benefit.
Chad Orzel
Most people go on living their everyday life: frightened half indifferent they behold the ghostly tragi-comedy that has been performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world.
Albert Einstein
If man studied himself, he would see how incapable he is of going further.
Blaise Pascal
As a kid I was deeply curious as to what college life would be like. Now that I am a university professor, I realize that this was a premonition that once I entered college I would never get out, and that my matriculation would turn into some sort of life sentence.
James Kakalios
It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy - and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment; indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encounter at all.
Erwin Schrödinger
It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics.
Feynman
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Niels Bohr
Sometimes I think about dying. And then I wonder about going to hell. And then I think that if and when I go there, the place will be completely organized and run by lost souls, with a council and a works committee and an ethics panel, and I'll feel right at home.
Charles Sheffield
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
Paul A.M. Dirac
Laughing like crazythe child goes back to the citygives birth to monsterscreates earthquakeshairy women run nakedold folks who look like fetuses laugh and smoke.
Nicanor Parra
No animal admires another animal.
Blaise Pascal
So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.
Richard Feynman
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. Snow
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....
Gerald Holton
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
Heisenberg
I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.
Wolfgang Pauli
The state was made for man, not man for state.
Albert Einstein
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.
Albert Einstein
People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted.
Blaise Pascal
Some individuals have the courage to make it, even feel the need to do so; for them the quest is a necessity, not an option. Most people setting out on such journeys are never heard from again, but part of the romance of any field lies in keeping the dream alive, in not settling for what is familiar and comfortable.
Gino Segrè
Lasting harmony between the sexes cannot be achieved through social, psychological, or political reform alone...they are not sufficient in themselves because gender reconciliation entails an inherent spiritual dimension. Gender disharmony is vast and pervasive; its symptoms are manifest in myriad ways in virtually every culture across the globe. For authentic gender reconciliation, we aspire to a comprehensive approach that includes but also transcends traditional modes of social change, invoking a larger universal intelligence or grace.
William Keepin
When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Stephen Hawking
For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.
Isaac Newton
The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.
Victor J. Stenger
... things are the way they are in our universe because if they Weren't, we would not be here to notice.
Brian Greene
Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.
Albert Einstein
The cognitive science's challenge is to link our consensus reality to our internal reality, but physics' challenge is to link our consensus reality to our external reality.
Max Tegmark
It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.
Abdus Salam