Quotes by Physicists - Page 21

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time.
Alan Lightman
Knowlege of God without knowledge of man's wretchedness leads to pride. Knowledge of man's wretchedness without knowledge of God leads to despair. Knowledge of Jesus Christ is the middle course, because by it we discover both God and our wretched state.
Blaise Pascal
Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person the consistently reasonable man.
Sir Arthur Eddington
How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
Christiaan Huygens
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.
Albert Einstein
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.
Isaac Newton
I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.
Nikola Tesla
I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.
Stephen Wolfram
One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.
G. C. Lichtenberg
They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers. . . . There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.
Paolo Giordano
Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.
Albert Einstein
All Mattia saw was a shadow moving toward him. He instinctively closed his eyes and then felt Alice’s hot mouth on his, her tears on his cheek, or maybe they weren’t hers, and finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.
Paolo Giordano
It's easy to make money when you have a lot of it.
Max Tegmark
Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
Alan Lightman
This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.
Mark Buchanan
Play is the highest form of research.
Albert Einstein
Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left.The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.)
Luis W. Alvarez
It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
Freeman Dyson
Quite obviously, a theoretical determination of the numerical value of α would signify great progress in our understanding of fundamental interactions. Many physicists have tried to find it, but without significant success to this day. Richard Feynman, the theory wizard of Caltech in Pasadena, once suggested that every one of his theory colleagues should write on the blackboard in his office: 137 -- how shamefully little we understand!
Harald Fritzsch
Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the Biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.
Robert Jastrow
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
Albert Einstein
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal
It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]
William Shockley
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.
Blaise Pascal
The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.
Max Planck
Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.
Carlo Rovelli
I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that;and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forgot that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day.
Richard Feynman
Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.
Gustaf Stromberg
When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again.
Albert Einstein
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.
Evelyn Fox Keller
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.
James Franck
If we can become still and open-minded we might all feel that unseen hand on our shoulder, letting us know we are not alone.
June Matthews
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.
Richard Feynman
What place, then, for a creator?
Stephen Hawking
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
Blaise Pascal
A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.
Wolfgang Pauli
Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city block by block. When soldiers occupied the hospital, The New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties. And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls.
Jean Bricmont
It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.
Albert Einstein
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
Albert Einstein
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Richard Feynman
Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
Alan Lightman
Today’s widespread social disharmony in relation to gender is not inevitable for human society, although it is the inevitable product of thousands of years of systemic gender injustice across the globe. Because we have never known anything else, it is difficult impossible for us to imagine what life would be like if we had grown up in a society that was truly integrated and healthy in relation to gender and sexuality. The entire fabric of human society would be vastly different from what we know today.
William Keepin
Moving beyond past wounds and hurts and building a culture of respect, dignity, and flowering love
William Keepin
[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.
Richard Feynman
All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ they aim at the same end.
Blaise Pascal
I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one.
Albert Einstein
The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.
Erwin Schrödinger
The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.
John Archibald Wheeler
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
Nicanor Parra
Want for your brother, what you want for yourself.
George Green
If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.
Albert Einstein
No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Einstein
I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women's colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a prin
Harriet Brooks
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
Albert Einstein
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space.
Albert Einstein
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them
William Lawrence Bragg