Quotes by Physicists - Page 20

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opin
Albert Einstein
The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.
William Keepin
Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty
Richard Feynman
Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla
I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ...The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc. ...I did not think I investigated. ...I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded. ...There is much to do, and I am busy, very
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.
Paolo Giordano
I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, "Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?""Back in that room that we just came through.""Oh!" I said in delight. "Then I'm gonna give a speech in that room!"The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part. We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, "This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions." They were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking. I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. "Oh!" I said. "I know that guy!" and I started through the door.The guide screamed, "No, no! Don't go in there!" By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn't chase me because he wasn't allowed to go through the door himself!
Richard Feynman
In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten.
Erwin Schrödinger
Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere...they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.
Victor J. Stenger
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
Albert Einstein
Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
Isaac Newton
We can measure the fine structure constant with very great precision, but so far none of our theories has provided an explanation of its measured value. One of the aims of superstring theory is to predict this quantity precisely. Any theory that could do that would be taken very seriously indeed as a potential 'Theory of Everything'.
John D. Barrow
Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
Blaise Pascal
This is not a "guilty pleasure" of mine, simply because I don't believe in "guilty" pleasures. Snobbery is just the public face of insecurity.
James Kakalios
We're all a genius, but If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Albert Einstien
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
G. C. Lichtenberg
We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences
Nikola Tesla
Keep in mind that imagination is at the heart of all innovation. Crush or constrain it and the fun will vanish.
Albert-László Barabási
Now if there is anything in this universe for which we do not have an "inkling," it is the ultimate goal of the Creator. Erroneous notions regarding this goal often stem from the misconception that all existence exists for man alone. The foible in this perception of the universe is the failure to realize that existence itself is good. The Five Books of Moses are bracketed by explicit statements of the worth of being. At the start we are told: "And God saw all that was made and behold it was very good" (Gen. 1:31)
Gerald Schroeder
Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay than they think.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.
Blaise Pascal
Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse.
John D. Barrow
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
Erwin Schrödinger
Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.
Franz Karl Achard
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
Freeman Dyson
All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.
Blaise Pascal
It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe.
Stephen Wolfram
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me.- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp
Albert Einstein
Racism is a disease of white people
Albert Einstein
Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio.
Stephen M. Barr
There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.
Steven Weinberg
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.
Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow
The birds can fly An' why can't I?
John Trowbridge
As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933)[Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.]
Auguste Piccard
More importantly, our software worked. I don't just mean that it didn't bump, or that it performed according to the written specifications, or that it was efficient in producing reports. It really worked
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
To him [Faraday], as to all true philosophers, the main value of a fact was its position and suggestiveness in the general sequence of scientific truth.
John Tyndall
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
Nikola Tesla
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Paul Davies
There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
Niels Bohr
Your printers have made but one blunder,Correct it instanter, and then for the thunder!We'll see in a jiffy if this Mr S[pencer]Has the ghost of a claim to be thought a good fencer.To my vision his merits have still seemed to dwindle,Since I have found him allied with the great Dr T[yndall]While I have, for my part, grown cockier and cockier,Since I found an ally in yourself, Mr L[ockyer]And am always, in consequence, thoroughly willin',To perform in the pages of Nature's M[acmillan].
Peter Guthrie Tait
Winning the [Nobel] prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work itself.
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?
Julian Schwinger
The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the — largely unconscious — embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management.
Fritjof Capra
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards fre
Albert Einstein
Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.
Blaise Pascal
eorum omnium actiones in se invicem
Isaac Newton
It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
[T]he ABCP market was built on a fatal flaw: a significant mismatch between the duration of the underlying assets (long-term) and the duration of the paper itself (short-term). While this structure is not unusual -- banks use it all the time -- the crucial difference is that banks have a strong liquidity provider in the event of a problem: the Bank of Canada. The trusts, however, were left in limbo.
Paul Halpern
My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein
The progress of science has always been the result of a close interplay between our concepts of the universe and our observations on nature. The former can only evolve out of the latter and yet the latter is also conditioned greatly by the former. Thus in our exploration of nature, the interplay between our concepts and our observations may sometimes lead to totally unexpected aspects among already familiar phenomena.
Tsung-Dao Lee
You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.
Brian Cox
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
Albert Einstein
All men have happiness as their object: there are no exceptions. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.
Blaise Pascal
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree with me if I say that whatever we were able to achieve in our later years had its origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hopes and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students.
Felix Bloch