Quotes by Physicists - Page 4

Before I came here, I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture, I am still confused -- but on a higher level.
Enrico Fermi
In the firmament of science Mayer and Joule constitute a double star, the light of each being in a certain sense complementary to that of the other.
John Tyndall
...the movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.
Gregory Benford
Success = 1 part work + 1 part play + 1 part keep your mouth shut
Albert Einstein
The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.
Sean Carroll
For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]
C.P. Snow
Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.
Robert Woodrow Wilson
Time is our most valuable nonrenewable resource, and if we want to treat it with respect, we need to set priorities.
Albert-László Barabási
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!
Albert Einstein
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.
Albert Einstein
The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.
Robert Remak
We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.
Nikola Tesla
Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
Alan Lightman
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
Albert Einstein
It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
Dennis Gabor
The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.
Fritjof Capra
Take it from me, an authority on expertise: You can't trust experts.
Jeff Schmidt
When employers designate certain jobs "professional" and insist that employees have professional training – not just the technical skills that seem sufficient to do the work – they must have more in mind than efficiency. Hierarchical organizations need professionals, because through professionals those at the top control the political content of what is produced, and because professionals contribute to the bosses' control of the workforce itself.
Jeff Schmidt
Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. [Michael Faraday] was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion.
John Tyndall
Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.
Blaise Pascal
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
For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning considered the objects themselves so thoroughly and directly as their nature requires, since all is abridged and simplified, as soon as we place ourselves in a right point of view.
Louis Poinsot
The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
Midhat Gazale
And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybody’s time to think about it. So what do we do?In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by:(1)  making it still harder;(2)  redefining what we mean by ‘solving’ it, so that it becomes something we can do;(3)  inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
E. T. Jaynes
The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to no
Rudolf Clausius
[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.
Albert Einstein
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
Albert Einstein
Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.
Leonhard Euler
One can still say that quantum mechanics is the key to understanding magnetism. When one enters the first room with this key there are unexpected rooms beyond, but it is always the master key that unlocks each door.
John H. Van Vleck
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
Blaise Pascal
Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.
Blaise Pascal
The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analysis itself and of discovering the elements which it most concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to conserve.
Joseph Fourier
[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define 'serendipity' as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.
Irving Langmuir
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Isaac Newton
For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.
Isaac Newton
The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.
Blaise Pascal
Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name
Gregory Benford
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
Albert Einstein
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Richard Feyman
The question that sometime's drive's me hazy, am i or the other's crazy?
Albert Einstein
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
Albert Einstein
If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.
Brian Greene
…The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.
Brian Greene
The only thing you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
Albert Einstein
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library
Albert Einstein
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
Albert Einstein
Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor.
Simon Singh
(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses.
Simon Singh
The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.
Cheikh Anta Diop
So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
Richard Feynman
It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’ cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…
Cheikh Anta Diop
As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty
Richard Feynman
Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC’s supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe—even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made.And the extremes don’t end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time.
Lisa Randall
My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes.
Robert Andrews Millikan
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
Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all?
Stephen Hawking