Quotes by Physicists - Page 9

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.
Stephen Hawking
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age
Isaac Newton
Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.
Galileo Galilei
Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.
Heinz R. Pagels
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
Paul A.M. Dirac
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.
Albert Einstein
If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat
Keep in Mind to be Kind.
A. Volta
Ego=1/Knowledge" More the knowledge lesser the ego, lesser the knowledge more the ego.
Albert Einstein
[C]ritics of Canadian securities regulators sometimes point out that a number of high-profile US securities cases have resulted in prison sentences for the offenders, while incarceration for Canadian securities law violators seems very rare...[A]s has often been noted, incarceration is far more frequent in the United States for crimes of all kinds, yet it is not usually suggested that this is proof that the United States is generally a safer place to live than Canada.
Paul Halpern
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.
Albert Einstein
Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
Paolo Giordano
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein
The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron, and the globe on which we tread would in all probability be rendered equal in brightness to the sun itself.
James Prescott Joule
Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water. ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth.
Francis William Aston
How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
Christiaan Huygens
I am here tracing the History of the Earth itself, from its own Monuments.
Jean-André de Luc
Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.
Carlo Rovelli
The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime.
Christophe Galfard
Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.
Christophe Galfard
I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe
Brian Greene
The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
Edward Teller
We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context—in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
One thought follows on the other, they are not distinct objects with clear boundaries; rather, one thought anticipates the next and thereby contains it. The thought that comes afterward contains the memory or trace of the former. Thus, the movement of thought within the mind requires a mathematics of implicate forms.
F. David Peat
Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.
Blaise Pascal
Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.
Albert Einstein
Science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don't.
Marcelo Gleiser
The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.
Carl David Anderson
I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.
Nikola Tesla
Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.
Brian Greene
A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub.(from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)
Isaac Newton
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
But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.
George Gabriel Stokes
If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.
Nikola Tesla
Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.
C.P. Snow
But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
Finally, let them recognise that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.
Blaise Pascal
This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in—a trial and error system.
Richard Feynman
I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.
Leo Szilard
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Blaise Pascal
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 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
I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn't feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. May be I was fooling myself. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.It's hard to explain. If a Martian(who, we'll imagine never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures-these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come--it would look to hi like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference--the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, "But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years." But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?"--all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life..We had a hell of good time together...
Richard Feynman
I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad.
Jim Al-Khalili
Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.
Gregory Benford
They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers. . . . There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.
Paolo Giordano
The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.
Nikola Tesla
Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.
Blaise Pascal
Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Stephen Hawking
You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.
Richard Feynman
Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.
Chen Ning Yang
The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.
Max Planck
Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.
Albert Einstein
One might be led to question whether the scientists acted wisely in presenting the statesmen of the world with this appalling problem. Actually there was no choice. Once basic knowledge is acquired, any attempt at preventing its fruition would be as futile as hoping to stop the earth from revolving around the sun.
Enrico Fermi
Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.
Brian Greene
For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one's youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are - in the secret heart where they take place - themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy.
C.P. Snow
The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.
Albert Einstein