Quotes by Physicists - Page 5

The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
Blaise Pascal
Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...
Cheikh Anta Diop
I rate enthusiasm even above professional skill.
Sir Edward Appleton
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.
Isaac Newton
The laws of gravity cannot be held responcible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
Alan Lightman
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
Victor J. Stenger
Cruel, Clever Cat.Sally, having swallowed cheese,Directs down holes the scented breeze,Enticing thus with baited breathNice mice to an untimely death.
Geoffrey Taylor
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
Richard Feynman
The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
Nikola Tesla
Humor, motivations, moral,gods,energy,secrecy
Albert Einstein
Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Stephen Hawking
The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime.
Christophe Galfard
In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who says there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, page 214)
Albert Einstein
I would not think that philosophy and reason themselves will be man's guide in the foreseeable future; however, they will remain the most beautiful sanctuary they have always been for the select few.
Albert Einstein
Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.
Albert Einstein
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
Brian Greene
This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.
Isaac Newton
The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
Blaise Pascal
There should be no boundary to human endeavor.
Stephen Hawking
We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.
Erwin Schrödinger
For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean?It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.
Richard Feynman
Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.
Stephen Hawking
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
Albert Einstein
As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflectiveabout their activity do not instinctively ask the question ‘Is itreasonable?’ as if they were confident beforehand what shaperationality had to take. We have noted how ‘unreasonable’, inclassical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out tobe. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth-seeking question takes the form, ‘What makes you think thatmight be the case?
John Polkinghorne
I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.
Edward M. Purcell
my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.
Freeman Dyson
All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.
Blaise Pascal
There's a kind of saying that you don't understand its meaning, 'I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it.'… You'll have to accept it. It's the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that's the way it looks. You don't like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, okay? If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.
Richard Feynman
Is it beautiful?”“Really weird. But don’t get hung up on the angels. They’re mostly assholes.
Ian Tregillis
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
Alan Lightman
The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.
Wolfgang Pauli
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much
Blaise Pascal
Phantasie ist wichtiger als Wissen, denn Wissen ist begrenzt.
Albert Einstein
(On the energy radiated by the Sun)It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.
Brian Cox
Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.
Chen Ning Yang
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
Niels Bohr
The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.
Edward Teller
I swear to use my scientific knowledge for the good of Humanity. I promise never to harm any person in my search for enlightenment.I shall be courageous and careful in my quest for greater knowledge about the mysteries that surround us. I shall not use scientific knowledge for my own personal gain or give it to those who seek to destroy the wonderful planet on which we live.If I break this oath, may the beauty and wonder of the Universe forever remain hidden from me.
Stephen Hawking
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein
I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.
Leo Szilard
At some point we have to give up and say that's just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.
Leonard Susskind
Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.
Blaise Pascal
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is 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
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced
Albert Einstein
I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.
Albert Einstein
And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice, will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
Alan Lightman
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.
Blaise Pascal
God is clever but not dishonest.
Albert Einstein
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).
David J. Griffiths
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change
Stephen Hawking
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems
Frank Wilczek
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to why they can be blown at all.
C. V. (Charles Vernon) Boys
If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.
Albert Einstein
Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles.Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.
Gordon L. Kane