Physics Quotes - Page 39

• Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt

  Lev Landau

  Errors, Doubt

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• The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.

  Imre Lakatos

  Years, Two, Confusion

  Imre Lakatos, John Worrall, Gregory Currie (1980). “The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers”, p.8, Cambridge University Press

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• Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.

  Ken Wilber

  Fundamentals, Significant

  Ken Wilber (2001). “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition”, p.99, Shambhala Publications

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• My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Wish, Chemistry, Sociology

  Vilfredo Pareto (1963). “The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology”

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• As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

  Freeman Dyson

  Together, Looks, Benefits

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.166, Pantheon

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• The arrogance of some of those who are so damned sure they are right is just astounding. Scientific witch hunts are often the worst kind, and have been since the secular authorities stopped enforcing the local bishop's decrees of anathema.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Math, Science, Arrogance

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• Politics follows the lines of physics: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

  John Avlon

  Opposites, Lines, Action

  John Avlon (2014). “Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama”, p.30, Beast Books

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• We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics.

  Polykarp Kusch

  Thinking, Century

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• I think nerdy stuff is sexy. I like to watch the History Channel and learn about the universe, quantum physics and stuff like that.

  Tila Tequila

  Sexy, Thinking, Watches

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• Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

  Franz Karl Achard

  Historical, Mind, Connections

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• I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between.

  George Polya

  Philosophy, Math, Not Good Enough

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• Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Mean, Science, Math

  Leonardo da Vinci (2008). “Notebooks”, p.10, OUP Oxford

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• He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Learning, Exercise

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Journeys, Adventures & Life in Harmony with Nature – 6 Book Collection (Illustrated): Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada & Canoeing in the Wilderness - North American Highlands Series”, p.270, e-artnow

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• Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Mean, Math

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”, p.626, Psychology Press

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• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Mean, College, Elderly

  Profiles of the Future ch. 2 (1962).

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• In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

  Wietse Venema

  Safety, Kind, Equipment

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• I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.

  Sidney Altman

  Opportunity, Waiting, Months

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• Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.

  David Bentley Hart

  Christian, Believe, Revolution

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• By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Lying, Moving, Science

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• What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Teaching, Science, Tangible

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• Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Knowing, Study

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• Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Diversity, Enquiry

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.178, Open Road Media

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• The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of awarding the the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1923. Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both-by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.

  Robert Andrews Millikan

  Science, Years, Two

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• From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Life, Science, Law

  "What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches".

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• I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Sight, Interesting

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