Physicist Quotes - Page 10

• Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

  Terry Pratchett

  Intelligent, Views, People

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Hogfather: (Discworld Novel 20)”, p.212, Random House

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• He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

  Primo Levi

  Gymnastics, Men, Creation Of Man

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• Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

  Bill Bryson

  Thinking, Atoms, Way

  Bill Bryson (2010). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.151, Random House

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• In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Littles, Facts, Remember

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• A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. 'Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?' he asks. 'No,' replies the colleague, 'but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it.'

  Niels Bohr

  Wall, Believe, Luck

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• Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Believe, Errors, Degrees

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Roger F. Gibson (2004). “Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine”, p.52, Harvard University Press

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• To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

  James Gleick

  Becoming, Chaos, States

  1987 Chaos.

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• Our relationships as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a beautiful woman - we should accept with gratitude any favours she offers, but we should not expect too much nor believe all that is said.

  Lev Artsimovich

  Beautiful, Gratitude, Believe

  Artsimovich Memorial Session of the Seventh International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research,

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• Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry.

  Steven Weinberg

  Science, Ideas, Hopeful

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• Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation.

  Max Planck

  Taken, Knowledge, Responsibility

  Max Planck (1959). “The new science: 3 complete works: Where is science going? The universe in the light of modern physics; The philosophy of physics”

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• Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

  Terry Pratchett

  People, Looks, Problem

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• Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

  Richard P. Feynman

  Thinking, Next, Physics

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.187, Princeton University Press

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• I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Country, War, Hydrogen Bomb

  Address to the United Nations, New York City, on September 18, 1959. The New York Times, p. 8, September 19, 1959.

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• The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

  Albert Einstein

  Lying, Heart, Nuclear

  Albert Einstein, Colette M. Kinnon, A. N. Kholodilin, J. G. Richardson (1981). “The Impact of modern scientific ideas on society: in commemoration of Einstein”, D Reidel Pub Co

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• There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

  Steven Weinberg

  Fall, Science, Long Ago

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• I was a child of a tech family. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and was always a gadget guy.

  Felicia Day

  Children, Guy, Grandfather

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure.

  Martin Rees

  Moving, Science, Law

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• We physicists don't like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that's when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.

  Michio Kaku

  Children, Hate, Sound

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• Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

  George Johnson

  Science, Hands, Boxing

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• The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)

  Albert Einstein

  Lying, Heart, Thinking

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• I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.

  Cynthia Breazeal

  Cowboy, Technology, Government

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• Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

  Arthur Eddington

  Science, Together, Add

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• You can pay attention to the fact, in which case you'll probably become a mathematician, or you can ignore it, in which case you'll probably become a physicist.

  Len Evans

  Funny, Science, Technology

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• Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

  Fritjof Capra

  Responsibility, Science, Issues

  "The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1983.

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• The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Philosophy, Plain Language, Understanding

  "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science". Book by Werner Heisenberg, 1958.

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