Physics Quotes - Page 36

• I suppose my interest in looking for life elsewhere in the universe really dates back to my teens. What teenager doesn't look up at the sky at night and think am I alone in the universe? Well most people get over it, but I never did and though I made a career more in physics and cosmology than astrobiology I've always had a soft spot for the subject of life because it does seem so mysterious.

  Paul Davies

  Teenager, Night, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Similarly for marking exercises, quantitative exercises, maybe not so much in mathematics, but certainly problem sets in physics, chemistry, and engineering and things like that where answers and methods are clear cut, absolutely. I would like to see that done online.

  David Gelernter

  Cutting, Exercise, Engineering

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• There are great science books that were conceived as books. Feynman's famous introductory lectures in physics, which have a beginning and an end, which are written with style.

  David Gelernter

  Book, Style, Lectures

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• We could tell them [alien civilization] things that we have discovered in the realm of mathematical physics, but there is stuff that I would like to know. There are some famous problems like how to bring gravitation and quantum physics together, the long-sought-after theory of quantum gravity. But it may be hard to understand the answer that comes back.

  Paul Davies

  Civilization, Long, Together

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I think my dad [ Stephen Hawking] would have been pleased if I had turned out a scientist because he truly believes that is the most interesting career open to anyone. But he also believes that you have to follow your own path in life and so he certainly wasn't going to push me toward theoretical physics when it didn't look like I was going in that direction naturally.

  Stephen Hawking

  Dad, Believe, Thinking

  "Q & A: Stephen Hawking and daughter Lucy". Today Interview, www.nbcnews.com. November 1, 2007.

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• It's physics. Pure physics, I'm falling fast and faster still. So fall with me. Fall down with me. And stay.

  Cecily von Ziegesar

  Fall, Faster, Stills

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• The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Psychics, Breaking Down, Hypothesis

  "Essays in Biography" by John Maynard Keynes, (p. 286), 1933.

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• When you advance a frontier, you're doing something that no one has done before. Every time that happens, you have to innovate. You have to think in new ways that hadn't been thought before. You have to invent a new piece of hardware, a new concept, a new law of physics, a new material, a new construction material to enable you to accomplish what it is that you chose to reach for by dreaming about tomorrow.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Dream, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Quantum physics fluctuates all the time. But now the fluctuations are not just particles coming into and out of existence, which happens all the time. It's whole universes coming into and out of existence.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Quantum, Fluctuation, Existence

  "Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks God, Aliens, And Multiverses". Interview With David Freeman, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 5, 2015.

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• In terms of the most astonishing fact about which we know nothing, there is dark matter and dark energy. We don't know what either of them is. Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe. That's stunning.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Dark, Law, Matter

  "Why Revive ‘Cosmos?’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Just About Everything We Know Has Changed". Interview With David Freeman, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 4, 2014.

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• Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Book, Reality, Long Ago

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• On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!

  Richard P. Feynman

  Weather, Psychology, Gold

  "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Book by Richard P. Feynman, 1985.

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• Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Different, Six, Seven

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.161, Princeton University Press

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• It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event . Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon [rather than with the event].

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mistake, Thinking, Arrows

  Richard P. Feynman (2014). “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, p.75, Princeton University Press

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• When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

  John Dewey

  Medicine, Humanity, Inquiry

  1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy.

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• If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Reality, Past

  "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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• Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.

  Michael Crichton

  Children, Firsts, Chemistry

  1969 The Andromeda Strain.

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• The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry ; a science for which this race created a new era.(...) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Powerful, Race, Intellectual

  "Cosmos". Book by H.G. Bohn, v2, p. 589,595, 1860.

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• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

  Niels Bohr

  Independent, Judgement, Development

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1999). “Collected works”

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• Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

  Paul Davies

  Lying, Everyday, Mind

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• You can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.

  Julian Assange

  Data, Paper, Journalism

  "‘A real free press for the first time in history’: WikiLeaks editor speaks out in London" by Joel Gunter, blogs.journalism.co.uk. July 12, 2010.

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• I think science and spirituality are one and the same, I don't think they're really different. The film makes pretty clear that quantum physics is validating all kinds of spiritual teachings.

  Jennifer Beals

  Spiritual, Teaching, Thinking

  "Is this it?". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2007.

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• One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.

  Stephen Hawking

  Law, Religion, Atheism

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• Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Years, Feelings, Atheism

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• Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.

  Lincoln Steffens

  Creativity, Law, Play

  Lincoln Steffens (1937). “The autobiography of Lincoln Steffens: abridged”

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