Physics Quotes - Page 3

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

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.

Emilio Segrè

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

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

Silvan S. Schweber

God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).

Paul Davies

Joe’s scientific life is defined by these significant near misses… He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves. Famous for nearly getting there.

Janna Levin

Universe is the smallest clock.

Vivake Pathak

The knowledge of the soul is knowledge of the universe

Alexis Karpouzos

Don't confound static electricity with ecstatic eccentricity. One will leave your hair up, the other will live up in the air!

Ana Claudia Antunes

What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.'Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—''Purely hypothetical—''—time travelers.''So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.

Dexter Palmer

What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?

Carlo Rovelli

It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics.

Carlo Rovelli

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.

Carlo Rovelli

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

The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant. ... An expanded form of the constant leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, ...

Malcolm H. Mac Gregor

In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.

Charles P. Enz

The measurement of human ability is in an infant state. Was it a requirement for the Wright Brothers to hold PhD’s before they could invent and take flight?

Alastair Agutter

The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward.

Richard Feynman

Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.

Ian Stewart

An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.

Janna Levin

Light takes darkness vanish and worlds reappear. Light opens each day with a blaring overture, then throws its wands to earth and casts diamonds on lakes and oceans. Each night, lights tricks make the stars seem alive.

Bruce Watson

In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137:Bethe was mischievous with 137Bohr was intrigued by 137Born was mystified by 137Fermi was frisky with 137Feynman was mesmerized by 137Heisenberg was fascinated by 137Lederman was enchanted by 137Pauli was consumed by 137Turing was matched by 137

Leon O Chua

Quite obviously, a theoretical determination of the numerical value of α would signify great progress in our understanding of fundamental interactions. Many physicists have tried to find it, but without significant success to this day. Richard Feynman, the theory wizard of Caltech in Pasadena, once suggested that every one of his theory colleagues should write on the blackboard in his office: 137 -- how shamefully little we understand!

Harald Fritzsch

Calculate the fine structure constant from first principles.

David J. Griffiths

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.

Werner Heisenberg

We can measure the fine structure constant with very great precision, but so far none of our theories has provided an explanation of its measured value. One of the aims of superstring theory is to predict this quantity precisely. Any theory that could do that would be taken very seriously indeed as a potential 'Theory of Everything'.

John D. Barrow

There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government.

Willem Witteveen

... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

Wolfgang Pauli

As relates to life on Earth, the fine structure constant determines how solar radiation is absorbed in our atmosphere, and it also applies to how photosynthesis works in plants.

Deepak Chopra & Menas C. Kafatos

The laws of physics could be like an onion, with new laws becoming operational as we probe new scales. We simply don't know!

Richard Feynman

We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.

Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow

True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.

Sheldon L. Glashow

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.

Steven Weinberg

In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.

Marja de Vries

I don't know what laws of physics are involved, but if you fill a gym with teenagersand tell them to stare at one object, heat is actually produced. I half expected tospontaneously combust.Katrina

Suzanne Selfors

A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works.

Bill Gaede

We are the last generation of humans on Earth!

Bill Gaede

The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.

K.C. Cole

The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?

Ursula K Le Guin

At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays—using them like a magnet!! Incredible!"There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers.

James Kakalios

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

Eugene Paul Wigner

...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.

M.L. von Franz

Without the time, the world is only a static material; without the sense, the world is only a dead living system

cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=

It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to why they can be blown at all.

C. V. (Charles Vernon) Boys

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Physics Quotes - Page 3

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