Physicist Quotes - Page 16

• No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

  William S. Burroughs

  Spring, People, Water

  William S. Burroughs (1993). “The Adding Machine: Selected Essays”, p.29, Arcade Publishing

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• I am open to [the notion of theistic revelation], but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder's comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

  Antony Flew

  Biblical, Example, Might

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• The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Beauty, Beautiful, Party

  "Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence". Book by Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, Preface, 1931.

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• ...contemporary physicists come in two varieties. Type 1 physicists are bothered by EPR and Bell's Theorem. Type 2 (the majority) are not, but one has to distinguish two subvarieties. Type 2a physicists explain why they are not bothered. Their explanations tend either to miss the point entirely (like Born's to Einstein) or to contain physical assertions that can be shown to be false. Type 2b are not bothered and refuse to explain why.

  David Mermin

  Science, Two, Missing

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• Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

  Frederick Soddy

  Science, Invasion, Reason Why

  American Journal of Physics, Vol. 14, (p. 248), 1946.

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• My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

  John Astin

  Dad, Math, Thinking

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

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• Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King, where a society of ants declares, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)

  Michio Kaku

  Kings, Science, Epic

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• In the 1920s the young English physicist Paul Dirac began trying to understand and describe the space-time evolution of the electron, the first elementary particle discovered by J.J. Thomson in 1897. Dirac was puzzled by an unprecedented property of space-time, discovered by Lorentz in his studies of electromagnetic forces, whereby if space was real, time had to be imaginary, and vice versa. In other words, space and time had to be a ‘complex’ mixture of two quantities, one real and the other imaginary.

  Antonino Zichichi

  Real, Two, Space

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• I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

  Elizabeth Warren

  Jobs, Stress, People

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• Wisdom is not just knowing fundamental truths, if these are unconnected with the guidance of life or with a perspective on its meaning. If the deep truths physicists describe about the origin and functioning of the universe have little practical import and do not change our picture of the meaning of the universe and our place within it, then knowing them would not count as wisdom.

  Robert Nozick

  Knowing, Perspective, Fundamentals

  Robert Nozick (1989). “The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations”

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• We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

  Alfred Kastler

  Light, Transition, Atoms

  Alfred Kastler (1988). “Oeuvre scientifique: 1956-1983”

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• [George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.

  Abraham Pais

  Science, Issues, Biographies

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• It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Thinking, Law

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• The law of attraction is the law of creation. Quantum physicists tell us that the entire Universe emerged from thought!

  Rhonda Byrne

  Law Of Attraction, Creation, Quantum

  Rhonda Byrne (2011). “The Secret”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• Four years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own web page. I'm amazed at that. I meet kids all the time, been talking to my cat on the Internet.

  William J. Clinton

  Cat, Kids, Science

  Clinton, William J. (1997). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1995”, p.1968, Best Books on

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• The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

  Richard Dawkins

  Science, Law, Problem

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.26, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don't have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don't adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.

  Jimmy Carter

  Christian, Years, Doubt

  "President Jimmy Carter Authors New Bible Book, Answers Hard Biblical Questions". Interview with Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 19, 2012.

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• Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Meaningful

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.231, Princeton University Press

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• The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Mathematician

  Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Just as a physicist has to examine the telescope and galvanometer with which he is working; has to get a clear conception of what he can attain with them, and how they may deceive him; so, too, it seemed to me necessary to investigate likewise the capabilities of our power of thought.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Science, May, Telescopes

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• A. Douglas Stone, a physicist who has spent his life using quantum mechanics to explore striking new phenomena, has turned his considerable writing skills to thinking about Einstein and the quantum. What he finds and makes broadly understandable are the riches of Einstein's thinking not about relativity, not about his arguments with Bohr, but about Einstein's deep insights into the quantum world, insights that Stone shows speak to us now with all the vividness and depth they had a century ago. This is a fascinating book, lively, engaging, and strong in physical intuition.

  Peter Galison

  Strong, Book, Writing

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• The result is that a generation of physicists is growing up who have never exercised any particular degree of individual initiative, who have had no opportunity to experience its satisfactions or its possibilities, and who regard cooperative work in large teams as the normal thing. It is a natural corollary for them to feel that the objectives of these large teams must be something of large social significance.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Growing Up, Team, Opportunity

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• What is the origin of the urge, the fascincation that drives physicists, mathematicians, and presumably other scientists as well? Psychoanalysis suggests that it is sexual curiosity. You start by asking where little babies come from, one thing leads to another, and you find yourself preparing nitroglycerine or solving differential equations. This explanation is somewhat irritating, and therefore probably basically correct.

  David Ruelle

  Baby, Science, Finding Yourself

  David Ruelle (1993). “Chance and Chaos”, p.164, Princeton University Press

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• The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Men, Physics, Concern

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• It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

  Lionel Trilling

  Science, Class, Names

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.425, Northwestern University Press

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