Physics Quotes

There should be no boundary to human endeavor.

~ Stephen Hawking

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

~ Douglas Adams

When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant. If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing (University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube)

~ Gary Taubes

The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

~ James S.a. Corey

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for a very big number.

~ Victor J. Stenger

Oppenheimer’s theorizing was so startlingly original — so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research — that his colleagues’ ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved.

~ Algis Valiunas

Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled electricity stuff. His apocryphal reply: I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it.

~ Sean Carroll

Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.Yes, very bad.

~ James S.a. Corey

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.

~ Primo Levi

We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values.

~ Edward Witten

[..] when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there.

~ Douglas Adams

Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics.

~ Henri Poincaré

I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ...Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, ....January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer.February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: A revelation!March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work.September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's indefatigable efforts.

~ Abraham Pais

The shortest path is not always the fastest.

~ Ali Alja'bari

The shortest path is no always the fastest.

~ Ali Alja'bari

Some astrophysicists have convinced themselves that the fifth significant figure of the fine structure constant has changed over the past ten billion years.

~ Sheldon L. Glashow

The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant, a ~ 1/137, as manifested in the factor-of-137 spacings between the classical electron radius, electron Compton radius, and Bohr orbit radius. ... An a-quantized mass-generation grid extends accurately from the electron all the way to the top quark t, and leads to a corresponding a-quantized particle lifetime grid.

~ Malcolm H. Mac Gregor

It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics.

~ Feynman

...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant...

~ Gary Taubes

A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

Astrophysics. 'It's a super-long shot' is practically the motto of our profession.

~ Marko Kloos

Some segments of this book may be rough going. That's the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand.

~ Kip S. Thorne

Arthur Compton became my graduate advisor. He was the ideal graduate advisor for me: he came into my research room only once during my graduate career and usually had no idea how I was spending my time.

~ Luis W. Alvarez

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

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

~ Bruce H. Lipton

I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics,” Darger said. “She is, in either case, ravishing.

~ Michael Swanwick

...every physicist knows that the laws of physics can be used to build a gun or a bicycle; physics does not dictate a specific use for its laws. To that extent, it should be obvious that the laws of physics are incomplete in predicting everything that occurs in nature—from Moral Materialism

~ Ashish Dalela

Science ... it works.

~ Marko Kloos

Nobody's immune to physics. I don't care how big and tough they are.

~ Marko Kloos

Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the kan. That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the millikan.

~ Luis W. Alvarez

The significance of [the fine-structure constant] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. [Forces of Nature]

~ Paul Davies

Um, right, okay. Have you taken any courses in interspatial manipulation? Probably not, huh?”“Can’t say that I have.”“Space-time topology?”“Nope.”“Transdimensional theory?”Rosemary made an apologetic face.“Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin!

~ Becky Chambers

Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass.

~ Stephen G. Brush

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

~ William H. Gass

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

Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.

~ Frank Close

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar. This appellation was not meant ironically.

~ Lee Smolin