Quotes by Physicists - Page 8

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.
Richard Feynman
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.
Brian Greene
What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?
Carlo Rovelli
We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.
Nikola Tesla
I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.
Marie Curie
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein
If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.
Richard Feynman
If tomorrow were never to come, it would not be worth living today.
Albert Einstein
Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.
Blaise Pascal
If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings, then, indeed, it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one's personal worldview and see reality through the eyes of others.
F. David Peat
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Stephen Hawking
With most people doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.
Georges Edouard Lemaître
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr
In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things.
Blaise Pascal
Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.
Blaise Pascal
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
Isaac Newton
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
Blaise Pascal
It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
John von Neumann
Curiosity is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.
Albert-László Barabási
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
Albert Einstein
Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
Richard Feynman
The single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe the universe is friendly.
Albert Einstein
We live in an environment in which sexuality is often trivialized and defiled, stripped of its emotional depth and divorced from its sacred root.
William Keepin
The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts but by his ordinary doing.
Blaise Pascal
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.
Richard Feynman
Religion is a culture of faith science is a culture of doubt.
Richard Feynman
The integrals which we have obtained are not only general expressions which satisfy the differential equation, they represent in the most distinct manner the natural effect which is the object of the phenomenon... when this condition is fulfilled, the integral is, properly speaking, the equation of the phenomenon; it expresses clearly the character and progress of it, in the same manner as the finite equation of a line or curved surface makes known all the properties of those forms.
Joseph Fourier
Well, I don’t. Not absolutely. But adopting "making money’’ as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn’t one item on that list that’s worth a damn if the company isn’t making money.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
. . .a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, "real" or "imaginary" time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.
Stephen Hawking
The lower classes of men though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems
Albert Einstein
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Albert Einstein
A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!
Richard Feynman
The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.
Christopher Wren
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
Blaise Pascal
Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.
Jim Al-Khalili
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Albert Einstein
Away from the safety of your home, the universe was not made for your convenience.
Edward Witten
It may be bizarre but in my opinion science offers a sure path to God and religion.
Paul Davies
We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense of the world around us. And all of these elements lie at the core of modern physics. The story is among the grandest -- the unfolding of the entire universe; the mystery is among the toughest -- finding out how the cosmos came to be; the odds are among the most daunting -- bipeds, newly arrived by cosmic time scales trying to reveal the secrets of the ages; and the quest is among the deepest -- the search for fundamental laws to explain all we see and beyond, from the tiniest particles to the most distant galaxies.
Brian Greene
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
Freeman Dyson
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!""Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
Richard Feynman
We became acutely aware of the profound healing that is needed in our species. We knew with conviction that what we were doing, as women and men together, was confronting the cultural dynamics that are killing us all- killing women and men, killing our children, killing the planet.
William Keepin
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Albert A. Bartlett
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
Blaise Pascal
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.
Galileo Galilei
We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.
Roger Penrose
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.
Charles P. Enz
The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.
William Thomson
The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
Albert Einstein
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us.
Max Tegmark
I like physics, but I love cartoons.
Stephen Hawking
Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.
Isaac Newton
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
Stephen Hawking