Physics Quotes

Terry Pratchett

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.. Terry Pratchett
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Richard P. Feynman

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.

Jasmine Warga

Sometimes I wonder if my heart is like a black hole-it's so dense that there's no room for light, but that doesn't mean it can't still suck me in.

Jasmine Warga

I once read in my physics book that the universe begs to be observed, that energy travels and transfers when people pay attention. Maybe that's what love really boils down to-having someone who cares enough to pay attention so that you're encouraged to travel and transfer, to make your potential energy spark into kinetic energy.

Albert Einstein

No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms
No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

Woody Allen

Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

Albert Einstein

Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.. Albert Einstein
Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.

Brian Greene

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Rivka Galchen

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

Toba Beta

I tell you about a fact and truth. In physical reality of matter,
there's no such thing as an imaginary spirit nor spiritual ghost.
They are also made of matter, but totally different in size and
laws of physics which rule their life and the way they interact.

Stephen Hawking

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

Felix Alba-Juez

There is no problem more difficult to solve than that created by ourselves.

Felix Alba-Juez

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.

Felix Alba-Juez

Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it.

Felix Alba-Juez

It is curious that the human mind could blindly accept an infinite speed but had reservations to accept a finite one, simply because it was too large!

Felix Alba-Juez

When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch!

Ian Hacking

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.

Ron Barrow

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!

Sheri Reynolds

Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.

David Eagleman

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Shannon Celebi

Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.

Bill Gaede

Define the word exist, and you'll know whether God exists.

Bill Gaede

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

Bill Gaede

Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.

Bill Gaede

If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!

Bill Gaede

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

Douglas Adams

Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning.

Timothy Leary

And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

Anton Zeilinger

Maybe knowledge is as fundamental, or even more fundamental than [material] reality.

Donald Barthelme

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

Thomas Jefferson

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

Michio Kaku

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.

Richard P. 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.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine.

Niels Bohr

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Erwin Schrödinger

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Aleister Crowley

Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.

Bill Bryson

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

Niels Bohr

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.

Lee Smolin

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.

Brian Greene

...quantum mechanics - the physics of our world - requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

Alexander Pope

Order is heaven's first law.

Stephen Hawking

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe - even a positivist one - remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

George Gamow

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

George Pólya

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 Gordon Byron

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

Alan Guth

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.

Roger Penrose

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.

Ken Wilber

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.

Bill Gaede

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

John Twelve Hawks

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

Mohammed Ali

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.

Murray Gell-Mann

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.

Martin Rees

[The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table.

Albert Einstein

Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.

Jon Edgell

Time becomes meaningless without memory.

W Quint , Manuel Vogel

The measured magnetic moment, together with fine structure constant determined by a different method, is the most stringent test of QED and the Standard Model of particle physics. The measured magnetic moment and QED theory together yield the most precise measured value of the fine structure constant.

Jean-Philippe Uzan

Alpha, known as the fine-structure constant, characterizes the interactions between matter and light. It has been very accurately measured in the laboratory. It is indeed the most precisely measured of all physical constants ... best memorized in the form ~ 1/137.

Frank Close

Alpha sets the scale of nature - the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.

Clifford A. Pickover

At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Carl Johan Calleman

We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.

Khalid Masood

Physics is the science of metaphysics.

Mohiro Kitoh

There are many people who say there's a God somewhere up there but, God is nothing more than a formula. Just a part of some law of physics that we have yet to understand.

Amy Zhang

Newton's laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren't that simple

Isaac Newton

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Carl Sagan

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.

Richard P. Feynman

I don't mind not knowing. It doesn't scare me.

Albert Einstein

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Roger Penrose

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ....

John D. Barrow

If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do not need to know everything before we can know something.

Paul A.M. Dirac

If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.

John Archibald Wheeler

Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.

Franz Karl Achard

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

Michael Kamakana

A billion neutrinos go swimming in heavy water: one gets wet.

Joseph Von Fraunhofer

It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physical optics and appears to open a new field.

Kevin Michel

What believer of faith among us can claim to understand the exact mechanistic structure of a world created by a god/God.

Kevin Michel

The more we delve into quantum mechanics the stranger the world becomes; appreciating this strangeness of the world, whilst still operating in that which you now consider reality, will be the foundation for shifting the current trajectory of your life from ordinary to extraordinary.

Khalid Masood

A moment of time is the biggest mystery in physics.

Khalid Masood

Time is the key to the heart of physics.

Khalid Masood

Time can change the laws of physics.

Khalid Masood

Physics is the story of time, with everything or nothing.

Khalid Masood

Physics is all about time.

Richard P. Feynman

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

Jean Fresnel

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. She avoids complication only in means. Nature seems to be proposed to do much with little: it is a principle that the development of physics constantly supports by new evidence.

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

Leon M. Lederman

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

Ernest Rutherford

Now I know what the atom looks like.

Edward Witten

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Li Zhi Fang

...in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing 'first cause' problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.

Isaac Newton

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

Richard P. Feynman

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty

Anita Shreve

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.

Bertrand Russell

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

Cynthia Sue Larson

Quantum jumping is the process by which a person envisions some desired result or state of being that is different from the existing situation - and by clearly observing that possibility and supplying sufficient energy, makes a leap into that alternate reality.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two.

Michael Brooks

There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe - or that they were applicable to every time in its history.

Werner Heisenberg

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

Santosh Kalwar

We are like some particle in motion always moving and meeting other particle.

Carla H. Krueger

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it.

Tsung-Dao Lee

Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.

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