Physics Quotes - Page 14

• Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Self, Law, Ideas

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• The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Errors, World

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• Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

  Noam Chomsky

  Long Ago, Childhood, Way

  "Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong". Interview with Yarden Katz, www.theatlantic.com. November 1, 2012.

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• Most important part of doing physics is the knowledge of approximation.

  Lev Landau

  Important, Approximation

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• Physics can be difficult sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean always. And by Physics, I mean everything.

  Sam Davis

  Mean, Sometimes, Difficult

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• In science, if the last 50 years were the age of physics, the next 50 years will be the age of biology.

  William J. Clinton

  Years, Age, Lasts

  Clinton, William J. (1998). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1997”, p.614, Best Books on

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• All of science can be divided into physics and stamp-collecting.

  Lord Kelvin

  Stamp Collecting, Stamps, Divided

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• The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Men, Rights

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• What physics looks for: The simplest possible system of thought which will bind together the observed facts.

  Albert Einstein

  Together, Looks, Facts

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• The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Hate, War, College

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• The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Differences, World, Patterns

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• Neutrino physics is largely an art of learning a great deal by observing nothing.

  Haim Harari

  Art, Neutrinos, Deals

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• Basically, I wasn't properly socialized, so it made sense to do physics.

  Lisa Randall

  Made

  "Not My Job: Physics Professor Lisa Randall Gets Quizzed On Phys Ed". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. November 21, 2015.

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• So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

  Charlie Munger

  Ethos, Economics, Precision

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• Trying to get a read on Apple Computer is a lot like learning about quantum physics; you can never know Apple's position on a technology, and its direction, simultaneously.

  Mark Pesce

  Technology, Apples, Trying

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• The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty.

  David Deutsch

  Biblical, Years, Data

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• Physics has found no straight lines. Instead, the physical universe consists of only waves undulating back and forth allowing for corrections and balance.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Balance, Lines, Wave

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• Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.

  Lord Kelvin

  Beautiful, Analysis, May

  Lord Kelvin, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S. and Peter Guthrie Tait, M.A. (1912). “Elements of Natural Philosophy”

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• Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Tired, Sleep, Shoes

  Albert Goldbarth (1991). “Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology : Poems”, p.118, University of Georgia Press

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• Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway?

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Games, Play, People

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• Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!

  Richard P. Feynman

  Couple, Mean, Years

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• I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' ... Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too - romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction!

  Ray Bradbury

  Art, Real, Law

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• It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

  Albert Einstein

  Theoretical Physics, Clerks, Eras

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• Matter is regarded as being constituted by a region of space in which the field is extremely intense . . . . . . There is no place in this new kind of Physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.

  Paul Davies

  Reality, Space, Matter

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• It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects.

  Colin McGinn

  Philosophy, Thinking, Average

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