Physics Quotes - Page 7

Maybe somewhere telepaths walked the Earth, but I wasn't one of them. In the process, I began to realize that the wondrous exploits of telepaths were probably impossible--at least without outside assistance. But in the years that followed, I also slowly learned another lesson: to fathom the greatest secrets in the universe, one did not need telepathic or superhuman abilities. One just had to have an open, determined, and curious mind. In particular, in order to understand whether the fantastic devices of science fiction are possible, you have to immerse yourself in advanced physics. To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics.

Michio Kaku

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

Gary Zukav

But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it.What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was—what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma’s all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she’d walk me through the door into her world and show it to me.

Charles Martin

Stay upbeat and keep your head held high. There is no end to the power of positive thinking. I AM looking forward to all the wealth, success, and abundance speeding my way!

Ron Barrow

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

Anita Shreve

MUSIC OF THE UNIVERSEWithout the orchestra of the universe,There would be no ether. And without its instrumentationBy the ether, There would be no waves. And without any waves, There would be no sound. And without sound, There would be no music. And without music, There would be no life. And without a life force, There would be no matter. But it does not matter - Because what is matter, If there is no light?

Suzy Kassem

Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere...they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.

Victor J. Stenger

Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works.

Richard Feynman

Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both without and within.

Marie-Louise von Franz

I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax

Richard Feynman

The less you move on the groundthe more the world moves around.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Vibration is the core of the spirit. It is the breath of life.

Suzy Kassem

There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women over this discovery than I would have believed possible.

Luis W. Alvarez

I am wealth, prosperity, and abundance. God multiplies this and I give thanks I AM receiving more and more money everyday.

Ron Barrow

Light is the magician of the cosmos.

Bruce Watson

We have entered the Age of Light. The ages of steam and coal are long gone. With oil clinging to power, light is emerging as our deus ex machine. Light goes where nothing else can, gets there faster than anything else could, and brings back the images. If there are limits to light, other than its cosmic speed limit, we have not tested them. If there is a final answer to the question "What is light?" we have not found it.

Bruce Watson

... who can forget the amazement of a child balancing an adult on a see-saw, simply by being placed at the right position. How could this be? Where did all that extra force come from!?The only wonder nowadays is that a physics student is unlikely to produce a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps we will be offered a few mumblings about moments, force times distance, laws of the lever perhaps even the "principle of virtual work". But we probably won't get an answer that seems to explain where that extra force comes from; and it is highly unlikely that we will get an answer that begins by establishing principles about rigid bodies, even though the rigidity of the lever is an absolute necessity for it to work.In fact, the whole path from Newton's Laws, which basically concern "point masses", to bodies whose shape and extent are significant, is often rather dubiously traversed, even though elementary physics courses blithely pose such problems of the most diverse sorts.

Michael Spivak

There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.

Robert Jastrow

For many years I have been saying that I would like to write a book (or series of books) called Physics for Mathematicians. Whenever I would tell people that, they would say, “Oh good, you're going to explain quantum mechanics, or string theory, or something like that”. And I would say, “Well that would be nice, but I can't begin to do that now; first I have to learn elementary physics, so the first thing I will be writing will be Mechanics for Mathematicians”. So then people would say, “Ah, so you're going to be writing about symplectic structures”, or something of that sort. And I would have to say, “No, I'm not trying to write a book about mathematics for mathematicians, I'm trying to write a book about physics for mathematicians”; …… it's elementary mechanics that I don't understand. … I mean, for example, that I don't understand this – lever.... Most of us know the law of the lever, but this law is simply a quantitative statement of exactly how amazing the lever is, and doesn't give us a clue as to why it is true, how such a small force at one end can exert such a great force at the other. Now physicists all agree that Newton's Three Laws are the basis from which all of mechanics follows, but if you ask for an explanation of the lever in terms of these three laws, you will almost certainly not get a satisfactory answer.

Michael Spivak

Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.

Robert Jastrow

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Robert Jastrow

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.

Robert Jastrow

When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt

Carlo Rovelli

I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another.

Abhijit Naskar

String theory makes sense to me because the universe is a symphony that creates harmony with the vibration of our strings.

Kamand Kojouri

The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in""Fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.

Ted Chiang

the conscience of universe itself lies in the path of equality and so is the gods

shashidhar sa

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now.But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

Dexter Palmer

A claim that event horizons exist is like someone's claim to be immortal: You would have to wait until the end of time to confirm the claim.

Seth Lloyd

If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . .

John Gribbin

Three dimensional time converts scalar waves into transverse waves.

R.A.Delmonico

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

Charles Stross

For us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.

Albert Einstein

The fine-structure constant is ubiquitous throughout physics. I’ve already noted its connection to the electromagnetic interaction. In atomic physics, the binding energy, fine-structure splitting, and Lamb shift are all proportional to powers of α. In condensed matter physics, α characterizes Josephson junction oscillations and quantum Hall resistance steps. In addition, α is an important component of our system of fundamental constants. [Physics Today]

Gerald Gabrielse

… there are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).

Albert Einstein

Very strange people, physicists, " he said as soon as they were outside again. "In my experience the ones who aren't actually dead are in some way very ill.

Douglas Adams

I am supposed to be helping her prepare for the GRE. Instead, we spend most of the time talking about color. The color of my clothes and shoes. The color of other people's clothes and shoes. The color of the sky when the sun has dipped just low enough to cause red light to bend the most and then, voilà, a sunset.

Weike Wang

...[P]hysics... [is] the philosophy of nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws.

Immanuel Kant

If the spirit of your imagination is limited, your journey of discovery will be very short.

Alastair Agutter

If our 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to 1 year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes, and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds.

Max Tegmark

In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.

Noam Chomsky

See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics.

Jim Butcher

If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.

Albert Einstein

We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it's form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist.

Mohammed Ali

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Murray Gell-Mann

For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell and having the bell keep on ringing. Sweet - who said his ideas came to him in dreams - turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets could be used to produce electricity, and wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other than the standard induction process. What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of motion. Sweet thought that if cosmic energy could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy would keep it moving.

Jeane Manning

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

Bill Gaede

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

John Twelve Hawks

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.

Ian McEwan

He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output rose significantly higher than the input. He concluded that, if allowed politically, such discoveries could guide humankind in building a completely clean energy infrastructure -- resonant technologies that allow us to live in harmony with the universal energy field and the Earth.

Jeane Manning

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.

Ken Wilber

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

Roger Penrose

It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.

Alan Guth

[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.]Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah. ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe.

Michio Kaku

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!

George Gamow

There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.

Guillermo González

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.

George Gordon Byron

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.

George Pólya

Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.

Richard Rhodes

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Physics Quotes - Page 7

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