Physicist Quotes - Page 20

• Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Funny

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.188, Princeton University Press

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• The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

  Albert Einstein

  Funny, Peace, Military

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb”, p.373, Princeton University Press

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• I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Growing Up, Thinking, Race

  "The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder and the Bomb" by Mark Fiege in Enviornmental History, Vol. 12, Issue 3, July 2007.

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• Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Philosophy, War, Responsibility

  Physics in the ContemporaryWorld (1947)

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• I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".

  Margaret Wertheim

  Mean, Home, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

  Tad Williams

  Profound, Bending, World

  Tad Williams (2002). “Otherland 4: Sea of Silver Light”, p.584, Penguin

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• Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of "I" in one word is too much.

  Michael Faraday

  Science, Thinking, Awkward

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• I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.

  Robin Ince

  Vain, Theory, Biologist

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• Everything that you've learned: 'Make a lot of money, have a nice house'. But they never teach you at school how to relate, how to communicate with others, how to share values with others. ...They teach you how to make a living. You become an optometrist, he becomes a physicist, she becomes a structural engineer, he's an architect.  In the future, none of that. Everybody is trained to be a generalist, so they understand different cultures, different values, how we get to be the way we are. So no-one can ever use you for war or killing anybody or hurting anybody

  Jacque Fresco

  Hurt, War, Nice

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• The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

  Alain Aspect

  Development, World, Mechanic

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• Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.

  Ted Chiang

  Lovely, Fundamentals, Levels

  Ted Chiang (2016). “Arrival (Stories of Your Life MTI)”, p.52, Vintage

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• We have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today.

  Anton Zeilinger

  Giving Up, Believe, Ideas

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• Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here's a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand] [...]. If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that's how you want to come at the problem

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moving, Ignorance, Mean

  "The Moon, the Tides and why Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Colbert's God". "The Science Studio" with Roger Bingham, January 20, 2011.

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