Quotes by Physicists - Page 22

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Albert A. Bartlett
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
William Lawrence Bragg
The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.
Niels Bohr
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.
Leonard Susskind
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Niels Bohr
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
Paul A.M. Dirac
Einstein said that if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right - the world is crazy.
Daniel M. Greenberger
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Richard Feynman
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Stephen Hawking
Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.
Albert Einstein
So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.
Richard Feynman
One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
Albert Einstein
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
If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?
Stephen Hawking
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
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
Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.
Galileo Galilei
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
Erwin Schrödinger
Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
Richard Feynman
What goes up must come down.
Isaac Newton
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
Niels Bohr
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.
Richard Feynman
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei
Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
Max Planck
Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding...
Brian Greene
A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
Albert Einstein
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
The human spirit must prevail over technology.
Albert Einstein
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
Richard Feynman
If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
Richard Feynman
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
Nikola Tesla
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Albert Einstein
Religion is a culture of faith science is a culture of doubt.
Richard Feynman
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
Victor J. Stenger
Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.
Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
Albert Einstein
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Richard Feynman
God does not play dice with the universe.
Albert Einstein
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
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Stephen Hawking
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery eac
Albert Einstein
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock.So I stopped wearing socks.
Albert Einstein
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
Albert Einstein
Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.
Carlo Rovelli
He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.
Blaise Pascal
Men spend their time in following a ball or a hare it is the pleasure even of kings.
Blaise Pascal
Our image is here and will for ever stay,and there is comfort in knowing that the memory of our lives will always be there,traveling among the stars.
Christophe Galfard