Top 100 Physicist Quotes

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time – of one thing preceding another – the effort to establish causality is a mug’s game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.

Affirmative action makes employers think, ‘Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard ’cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C’s in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.’

The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

My dad’s a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew’s observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley’s Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise.

Most physicists like myself won’t believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

If you’re a physicist, for heaven’s sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn’t agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal.

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.

A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.

Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.

After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson’s mass is what it is.

Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches – I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments’ results. They were raving about how it’s driving their research.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, we have long had a tradition of close cooperation between physicists and technicians.

For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.

My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

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.

Julian Assange is self-consciously an individual. He thinks in his own way, primarily as a physicist, having studied pure maths and physics at university in Australia where he grew up.

In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.

In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying ‘implicate order’ that transcends time and space.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

Tom Petty was one of my guitar students; I knew Duane, and Stephen and I had a band. When he left, Bernie Leadon moved to Gainesville. His father was a nuclear physicist who was sent to the University of Florida to start their nuclear research facility, so he and I became friends.

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.

The album ‘Physicist,’ I erased all the work that I had done halfway through. I think that’s probably why that contributed to that album being sort of sub-par for me, just because by the time I had to go back and do it, I was just over it.

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

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

I have more nuclear physicists living in my district than in any other district.

You’re no longer the engineer or the physicist or the writer – you’re the whistleblower.

As a physicist, I’ve always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.

I’m fascinated by people who have to reinvent themselves. I did it a few times – I was going to be a physicist before I was passionate about philosophy – and I realized that one more change, and I’m going to start looking like a dilettante.

My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.

We physicists don’t like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that’s when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.

Now, what space ultimately is – I should confess, I think most physicists believe – we don’t yet know.

Physicists are interested in measuring neutrino properties because they tell us about the structure of the Standard Model, the well-tested theory that describes matter’s most basic elements and interactions.

To a theoretical physicist, there is no greater joy than to see that this curious activity we call calculation – the depositing of ink on paper, followed by throwing away the paper and depositing new ink on more paper – can actually tell us something about reality.

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.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.

The ability to work together has to be in the blood of particle physicists. They learn very early on that it is impossible to advance on one’s own and that constant exchange is necessary.