In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.
It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.
We need less memorization – I never memorized the periodic table of the elements – I’ve never used it, and I’m a physicist! I can look it up.
There’s branches of science which I don’t understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.
You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.
I met Pierre Curie for the first time in the spring of the year 1894… A Polish physicist whom I knew, and who was a great admirer of Pierre Curie, one day invited us together to spend the evening with himself and his wife.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.
Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.
I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.
Rush Holt would be a fine senator. He’s an actual physicist, which is neat. He cares very strongly about global warming, which is probably the single most pressing issue of our era.
Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
I was brought up as a physicist.
Thor is magical, yes, but it is the magic of reality. His hammer was crafted ‘in the heart of a dying star,’ but so were you! Most of the atoms that make you up are in fact the innards of a ball of gas in space that got so heavy that it exploded. Stars died so that you could live, as physicist Lawrence Krauss would say.
There are no excuses for theoretical physicists not to perform and deliver.
I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.
What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.
For a physicist or a mathematician, the most symmetrical object you could think about would be a sphere, because it looks identical no matter what you do to it, however you rotate it in any given direction.
My brother Carl became a physicist; I became an economist.
I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience.
The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.
I’m not a science fiction writer, I’m a physicist.
Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.
Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.
Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, ‘Oh, I hated physics in high school.’ That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.
The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.
Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.
Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.
I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.
Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.
I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don’t adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.
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.
The work of mathematicians on ‘pure’ problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.
The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.
I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.
Among physicists, I’m respected I hope.
As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.
It takes so long to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
I was a child of a tech family. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and was always a gadget guy.
Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.
My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That’s the kind of thing we would talk about.
I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.
When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists.
Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.
My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.
Current psychological priesthoods ignore the fact that the profession of psychology was originated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who recognized that the key to understanding human nature was the relationship between external stimuli and the brain.
The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.
My goal is that a girl will watch ‘The Martian’ or ‘Interstellar’ and think, ‘I want to be an astronaut or a quantum physicist.’ It’s important to show powerful women who are good at their jobs because young girls need those examples.
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