Physicist Quotes - Page 9

• When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.

  Michio Kaku

  Past, Ice, Play

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• Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Scientist

  "Leaders in Computing: Changing the Digital World".

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• When chemists have brought their knowledge out of their special laboratories into the laboratory of the world, where chemical combinations are and have been through all time going on in such vast proportions,-when physicists study the laws of moisture, of clouds and storms, in past periods as well as in the present,-when, in short, geologists and zoologists are chemists and physicists, and vice versa,-then we shall learn more of the changes the world has undergone than is possible now that they are separately studied.

  Louis Agassiz

  Science, Past, Clouds

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• If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

  Albert Einstein

  Knowledge, Science, Should Have

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• As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Humble, Honor, Proud

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• The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.

  Moby

  Men, Thinking, Renaissance

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• Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

  Terry Pratchett

  Disagree

  "Fictional character: Narrator". "Terry Pratchett's Hogfather", www.imdb.com. 2006.

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• My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

  Joan Baez

  Dad, Father, Firsts

  "Joan Baez on the new protest era: The whole world's watching". Chicago Tribune Interview, www.chicagotribune.com. October 26, 2011.

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• When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.

  William J. Clinton

  Cat, Patriotic, High Heels

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• After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say "Russia!" to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, "How much?" We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

  Michio Kaku

  Life, War, Learning

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• Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Science, Understanding, Nuclear

  Kenneth E. Boulding (2017). “Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms”, p.149, Routledge

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• Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

  New Scientist, Vol. 21, No. 374, January 16, 1964.

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• No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

  Jacques Derrida

  Language, Speak, Mathematician

  Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.115, Stanford University Press

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• Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

  Stephen Hawking

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• Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

  Arthur Eddington

  Nature, Stars, Science

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• Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

  Richard Dawkins

  One Day, Bangs, May

  "God vs. Science". Interview with David Van Biema, content.time.com. November 5, 2006.

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• A good deal of my research in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problem, but simply examining mathematical equations of a kind that physicists use and trying to fit them together in an interesting way, regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later to have an application. Then one has good luck. At age 78.

  Paul Dirac

  Good Luck, Science, Mathematical Equations

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• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Inspirational, Nature, Science

  Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident appendix (1986)

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• The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

  Clifford Geertz

  Mean, Thinking, Intuition

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• Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

  Brian Greene

  Science, Avant Garde, Mathematics

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• When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

  Brian Greene

  School, Math, Firsts

  "Sunday Q&A: Physicist seeks truth about cosmos". Interview With Eric Berger, www.chron.com. September 27, 2009.

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• God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

  Francis Collins

  Mathematician

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• Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

  W. H. Auden

  Dance, Children, Ballet

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• The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.

  Jeff Lindsay

  Teacher, Smart, School

  Jeff Lindsay (2010). “Dexter Is Delicious: Dexter Morgan (5)”, p.67, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!

  Daniel Dennett

  Religious, Lying, Richard Feynman

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