Quotes by Physicists - Page 14

Health is the ability to realize our avowed and unavowed dreams.
Moshé Feldenkrais
Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.
Richard Feynman
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
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman
Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
Richard Feynman
No one does anything right in life, until they realize that they are making a mistake
Albert Einstein
Prayer makes no sense apart from waiting.
Mark Buchanan
God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.
Blaise Pascal
Author wonders whether God's proclamation of His natural mastery when appearing to Job might be about restoring a sense of wonder to world-weary man as much as humbling him.
Mark Buchanan
The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.
Stephen Hawking
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
One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.
C.P. Snow
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
Albert Einstein
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.- Science and Religion (1941)
Albert Einstein
Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.
Steven Weinberg
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
Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.
Steven Weinberg
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
Steven Weinberg
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.
Enrico Fermi
If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than th
Ernest Rutherford
[I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.
Max Planck
The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.
Nikola Tesla
If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.
Sean Carroll
Within this confusion a few fundamentals remain constant:a. A strong belief is more important than a few facts.b. The stronger the belief, the fewer the facts.c. The fewer the facts, the more people killed.
Milton A. Rothhman
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Niels Bohr
One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.
Albert Einstein
Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.
Paolo Giordano
What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have that right.
C.P. Snow
Today's science is tomorrow's technology.
Edward Teller
Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind -- exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.
Albert Einstein
A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.
Jean Baptiste Perrin
The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.
Nikola Tesla
Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.
Nikola Tesla
You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
Nikola Tesla
Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.
Kip S. Thorne
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.
Dennis Gabor
When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.
Freeman Dyson
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.
Blaise Pascal
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
Alan Lightman
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
Nikola Tesla
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
I am thankful for all of those who said NO to me. It’s because of them I’m doing it myself.
Albert Einstein
Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein
The framing of a problem is often far more essential than its solution
Albert Einstein
The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
Niels Bohr
When I was a boy I felt that the roll of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the un-obvious- because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel associations, and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes, paradoxically, a sort of automatic mechanism of originality.
Stanislaw Ulam
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.
Nikola Tesla
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Albert Einstein
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
Albert Einstein
We are the unknown, he says, and you will join us.
Andrew Crumey
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
Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.
Albert Einstein
Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. ... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science.
Philip Abelson
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a b
Stephen Hawking
As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes.
Wolfgang Pauli
Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.
Albert Einstein
Hope that justice will be done to those brave men who stood up for their convictions.
Albert Einstein