Words matter. These are the best Physics Quotes from famous people such as James Heckman, Alastair Reynolds, Duke Johnson, Sheldon Lee Glashow, James Gleick, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.
I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can’t be both.
Movement and physics: These are the fundamentals of animation. You don’t notice that stuff if it’s done well, but if fabric or liquid or hair moves weird, your brain is like, ‘Wait, that’s not real.’
One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure.
Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.
Modern low temperature physics began with the liquefaction of helium by Kamerlingh Onnes and the discovery of superconductivity at the University of Leiden in the early part of the 20th century.
At the moment I’m doing this space movie, so I’m obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it’s gone. Then I’ll be able to superficially say stuff about space.
Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.
The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.
Bowling is all physics and energy distribution. It’s F = ma. So it is actually one of the most science-y sports, because it literally is just a ball and a surface and objects to knock down.
We are increasingly becoming cyborg-like beings. We are becoming literally what we create. Biology, physics, and technology are evolving towards one and the same thing.
I had no new ideas on the physics we might learn, and I could not compete with the younger generation.
In literature classes, you don’t learn about genes; in physics classes you don’t learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
I have a problem with telling jokes about physics. Quite often the audience have no idea what you are talking about and, to be honest, I don’t know what I’m talking about either.
If I wasn’t acting or doing stand-up, I would be in animation. Or if I had the discipline I might studies physics.
Nuclear physics is interesting but it is unlikely to help society.
I landed in Mumbai & I started doing acting. I would do acting for 5 days and I would teach Physics & Maths in the remaining two days which would cover my expenses.
As a physics major at Yale in the 1970s, I developed crushes on nearly all my male professors.
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
You’ve never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.
I’m into the law of attraction and quantum physics. Like cosmic ordering. It’s all about thinking lovely things that you would like in life, and feeling good about them before they manifest, so that by the time they do, you don’t want them because you’re on to your next desire.
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.
Although I was really interested in physics, I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was really hard. I did theoretical physics.
Even when I wasn’t doing much ‘science for the public’ stuff, I found that four or five hours of intense work in physics was all my brain could take on a given day.
For ‘Ghostbusters,’ the thing that makes it such an amazing franchise and an amazing idea is that it is adds the element of physics and technology. It’s not just about ghosts. Who the heck came up with that? It is such a good idea, such a unique combination of stuff from different genres. Ghosts and sci fi.
My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.
It is very difficult to find appropriate words to say ‘thank you’ for an honour like the Nobel Prize. It is the supreme honour that a scientist can receive. Some of the giants in physics and chemistry have received this prize.
Physics is nothing but the ABC’s. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.
I designed a system to project video on the moon for all of humanity to see. I did this sort of as therapy as I was doing my Ph.D. in device physics.
What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.
In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.
I’m proud of the fact that I thought of the solar wind. It was an exercise in pursuing curiosity, which is the main motivation for studying physics from a personal standpoint.
I was black, studying physics and engineering. I was from a small school nobody ever heard of.
I think that I got committed to physics at the age of – oh, it must have been 1942 – ten, when most countries were at war and children were interested in airplanes and bombs and such things.
My hope is that in the future, women stop referring to themselves as ‘the only woman’ in their physics lab or ‘only one of two’ in their computer science jobs.
Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
As Stephen’s fame began to take off in a big way, and because he was so immersed in physics, it was becoming more and more difficult to communicate with him.
I’m a big believer in quantum physics, which says that the universe is more incredible and mysterious than any of us can imagine, which is my way of saying, ‘Anything is possible, including angels.’
Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies.
There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.
I was a very good student. But I didn’t have the latitude to study more. I was never allowed to do anything cross-disciplinary. Why can’t an engineering student learn physics?
I came from a very small high school in which there was no guidance and not any appreciable amount of physics taught, nor much mathematics. So I didn’t know what academia was all about until I got to college.
I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it’s the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that’s why I’m attracted to it.
A rainbow is the product of physics working for your appreciation of beauty.
I love physics.
I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics.
I look back upon graduate school as being a very happy period in my life. The chance to be thoroughly immersed in physics and to be surrounded by friends pursuing similar goals was a marvelous experience.
For me, science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.
I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943.
The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.
Scientists – who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests – figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.
The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason – these are very important.
I had a few teachers when they would hear a noise they would immediately be like, ‘Nadine, outside!’ I spent about two years standing outside the physics classroom.
The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.
If you look at other countries, you’ll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It’s something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what’s appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.
They told me that, as a woman, I’d never get into graduate school in physics, so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there.
My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.
I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would – I would say that it’s probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it’s mostly chemistry.
Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.
The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.
Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.
Physics tells us observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Rather, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability.
It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.
There are some parts I like about school. I like math a lot, and I like physics.
Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist.
Laser cooling opened a new route to ultralow temperature physics. Laser cooling experiments, with room temperature vacuum chambers and easy optical access, look very different from cryogenic cells with multi-layer thermal shielding around them.
Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It’s just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink.
Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
I read a lot of astronomy magazines, and go to a lot of astronomy sites, and physics sites. I love reading about quantum computation and quantum physics. I don’t understand it all, but I love reading it over and over again so that I think I have some idea of what they’re talking about.
Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.
And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.
I don’t think Brian Cox does ‘The Wonders of the Solar System’ because he believes the world would be a better place if people understood about the rings of Saturn; I just think he finds physics extremely interesting. It brings him joy, and he wants to spread the love. I feel the same about economics.
Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don’t understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.
In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.
In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.
Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.
Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. ‘Where did the totality of reality come from?’ ‘Did time have a beginning?’
When I first went to college, I went into physics, and my goal was to help perfect nuclear fusion so I could solve the energy crisis and global warming. I probably would have done it, too, if I’d stuck to it.
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries – the arts and humanities.
The life force knows exactly what it takes to keep any particular living organism – any organism – alive. Anything in manifestation, for that matter. Even a rock is a manifestation of some sort, and you know, in physics and quantum physics, they know a rock is not dead.
Space, the whole universe – I know no better place to find new physics.
The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Today’s particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar – and they had the ability to investigate it.
The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we’re correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.
We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries – and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world’s greatest pure physics thinktank, and it’s located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth’s moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.
The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.
If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.
For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.
I was not paying attention during physics in high school; I was wondering if I was going to be cast in ‘Pippin.’
I was nearly as far behind in calculus as I was in physics. But I wasn’t the only woman in the class, so I felt more comfortable asking questions.
I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.
I have degrees in social science, math and physics. Everything but business.
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
There are some countries where there is not an issue with women in physics. Malaysia, for example, has physics departments where 60 per cent of undergraduates are female, and France and Italy are strong, too. It is not about ability but more about what the culture says is appropriate.
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
It’s obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn’t come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial.
Football isn’t nuclear physics, but it’s not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.
Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.
In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.
Mulan is not a superhero, so her physical action needed to be anchored in a strong female body and bounded by the laws of physics.
The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we’re looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.
Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn’t do anything that people are doing, and we don’t really see any evidence that this is not the case.
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.
We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.
There are physicists, and there are string theorists. Of course the string theorists are physicists, but the string theorists in general will not attend lectures on experimental physics. They will not be terribly concerned about the results of experiments. They will talk to one another.
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.
I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics.
The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
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.
At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics.
The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.
It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
My mom studied biology and my dad studied chemistry and some physics and he is a physician, but he had a very strong interest in astronomy and astrophysics and exploration in general.
I actually studied literature at university, so I’m much more of an arts-based person, but I remember I actually did enjoy physics because you got to do weird experiments. I remember we did this thing with static where we all had to put our hands on this static ball to see that your hair would all stand on end.
You can’t argue with physics, mate.
The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.
I was never exposed as a kid to any real science. I read the occasional popular science book, and I loved Mechanics Illustrated, which had a lot of pseudo-science in it: It wasn’t until I got to college that I began to appreciate what physics is all about, and that was really an accident also.
The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.
Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap – it is all in the mind.
The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.
There’s something called From ‘Alchemy to Quarks,’ which will teach you everything you have to know, you want to know, about physics.
When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.
Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, 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 became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn’t see any need to go beyond that.
The decline of particle physics in the U.S. is really a symptom of the erratic and sometimes anti-scientific attitudes in Washington and the incompetence of Congress in managing science.
From age 16 on, I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt. This was necessary for university entrance, and so I stayed an extra year to repeat it. This time, I did splendidly and was admitted to Sheffield University, my first choice because of their excellent Chemistry Department.
The kitchen’s a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It’s biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there’s history. Yes, there’s artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.
I like to study a lot of math, physics, and the Bible, too. For me, they all show that there’s a lot more to things than we see.
I went to Yale and I was a physics and philosophy undergrad, graduated in 2005.
There is no law of physics that says just because we’re connected, there has to be this schism between our physical lives and our digital lives.
If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing.
Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.
Politics follows the lines of physics. Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.
I want to try to do something for women in physics worldwide.
There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.
The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.
Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, – physics and chemistry.
If you’re talking about nuclear physics, I have to defer to the next guy. But if you’re talking about football, I don’t have to take a back seat to anyone.
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.
I chose to pursue a career in physics because there the truth isn’t so easily bent.
It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.
Thinking about quantum physics is like unraveling your brain and putting it back together again upside down. Much like studying Kabbalah.
A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.
What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.
Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
When I got started in my own engineering course, my interest in physics and maths was very high. After all, engineering is all about applied maths and physics. If I were to learn anything further in physics or mathematics, it simply was not there.
One of the weird things about modern physics is that we do find there are apparently these other dimensions that we don’t directly experience that explain some aspects of the overall geometry and reality of our universe.
From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly.
In the late ’30’s when I was in college, physics – and in particular, nuclear physics – was the most exciting field in the world.
My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn’t make it work.
Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.
In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the ‘Mind of God’ is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace.
We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.
Politics follows the lines of physics: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.
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.
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.
My students know I have a life, they know I’ve written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would’ve told them anyway!
Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I’m nowhere near Einstein’s caliber.
I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about.
I work out every morning for an hour while in front of the news channel or business channels, then I’ll ride for four, five hours a day. So I’m on the move all the time, and I think that’s the key. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. That’s the law of physics.
The nerds are my favourite sort of boys – any guy with a passion – whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it’s super sweet and it’s very attractive for a female.
The exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman.
My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.
I’ve learned that I’ve just barely scratched the surface of knowledge of the profession, and I have deep envy of and appreciation for filmmakers who really, truly understand the physics, the design of filmmaking. They can do story and color and composition and geometry and math and science all at once.
By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments… in most people’s minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do – all these effects that Einstein’s theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.
It’s not magic! It’s physics. The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright. It’s like a spinning top.
What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They’re attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That’s certainly physics, but it’s a kind of physics that is not yet testable.
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.
What is important about graphene is the new physics it has delivered.
The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.
Even in technology, you have the freedom to solve a problem your way, you see. But it naturally sits in a certain framework whereas, in the physics, everybody had to come up with his own idea what he was going to do.
As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn’t make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.
As physics has proven, we’re ultimately particulate matter, which means we are all one. That’s why racial and gender bias is so ridiculous.
The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.
My A-levels were physics, chemistry and maths. Science is fascinating but I wouldn’t say I have used it since then. I decided to do economics.
Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.
Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It’s completely non-practical, and you can’t use it for anything. But it’s about the universe and how the world came into being. It’s very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.
Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong.
I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science – to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.
As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.
I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to – it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
No matter how many times you’ve seen the movies and the TV shows that have a protagonist leaping in the path of a bullet, physics forbids such sacrifice. Because of a bullet’s radical speed, you can’t jump in front of it, but you could get in its way. It’s not as dramatic, but it does save lives.
Nevertheless, if I have at times been able to make original contributions in the accelerator field, I cannot help feeling that to a certain extent my slightly amateur approach in physics, combined with much practical experience, was an asset.
I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals – or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it’s not all that interesting.
Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard – there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use – yet we can’t embed it in government.
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 want to study theoretical physics because it is one of the hardest things there is.
The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.
We do a lot of science on the space station. Over the course of the year, there’ll be 400 to 500 different investigations in all different kinds of disciplines. Some are related to improving life on earth in material science, physics, combustion science, earth sciences, medicine.
In physics, to be in two places at the same time would be a miracle; in politics it seems not merely normal, but natural.
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.
We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.
Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don’t really know.
I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
‘Real Housewives of New Jersey’ has taught me more about the nature of a vacuum in space than any of the demonstrations in my high school AP physics textbook.
The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear – a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.
Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.
It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.
I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.
I dont dream that much, but for a long time I had a recurring dream which wasnt funny at all. I was in a physics exam, and was asked a question by a teacher which I constantly got wrong.
The creation of Physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North and South have equally participated in it.
I’ve been actively doing a lot of courses and research into healing modalities, alternative therapies, science, physics and metaphysics.
‘Indigo Prophecy’ already brought a lot of new features to the traditional adventure genre, including the Action system, MultiView, Bending Stories, etc. ‘Heavy Rain’ will include features like advanced physics and AI, realistic characters and living environments.
People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.
I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.
Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.
That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics.
We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.
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.
We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics.
I’m a person who’s very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.
It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling, you can show the relationship.
I need physics more than friends.
Well, I’m leaning probably toward the sciences like physics.
It was only in the second year of my Ph.D. that I started acting. I wasn’t in school plays or anything; I was in bands, but I wasn’t cool. There’s no such thing as a cool physics person, is there?
Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics.
I would say there are three important things about graphene. It’s two-dimensional, which is the best possible number for studying fundamental physics. The second thing is the quality of graphene, which stems from its extremely strong carbon-carbon bonds. And finally, the system is also metallic.
Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.
Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics.
Darwinism doesn’t explain where gravity comes from. It doesn’t explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn’t explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn’t explain where matter came from.
I have this amateur side attraction to, and interest in, the sciences and biology and physics and evolution. Paleontology is of interest to me. I’m interested in the way these fields have helped us understand how we are human and why we are human.
My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I’d spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the ‘National Geographic.’
Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.
I started in engineering, where I think I could have happily remained and, who knows, made a bundle as a civil engineer or mechanical engineer. But more of my friends happened to be majoring in physics than engineering, so I switched over. No more compelling reason than that.
Either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content, or else theology must ultimately become a branch of physics.
Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.
In 1955, I got my degree in electrical-mechanical engineering. I realised, however, that my interest was less in practical applications than in the understanding of the underlying theoretical structure, and I decided to learn physics.
The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.
Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire.
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.
To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It’s one whole.
Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.
I loved teaching. In addition to that, I love physics. And so what could be better than to talk physics to bright young students?
Just the actual physics of putting it all together, you know, the latter period is actually quite fragmented in terms of the licenses and all those things so it makes a compilation of the full twenty years really a technical minefield.
I have been connected with the Niels Bohr Institute since the completion of my university studies, first as a research fellow and, from 1956, as a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen. After the death of my father in 1962, I followed him as director of the Institute until 1970.
If you are teaching a kid about seasons, you can put it in a song. He will definitely take interest. I wish to put every physics formula into a song, and it will become very easy for the student to learn.
Now in the 21st century, the boundaries separating chemistry, physics, and medicine have become blurred, and as happened during the Renaissance, scientists are following their curiosities even when they run beyond the formal limits of their training.
I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.
I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.
Ah, political physics. Someone wins an election and, poof, they are a candidate for vice president. Ridiculous.
If you go into any physics lab, everybody is depressed and feels isolated. We don’t get any feedback that anybody cares about what we’re doing.
I was very good at math and physics. And that’s all. I can’t do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.
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.
The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.
I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.
The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.
One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
Quantum physics is quite interesting. All these tiny particles are there as much as they’re not there. That to me is very, very interesting. And how our thoughts change the outcome of an experiment, I think that’s all quite spiritual.
My subjects were maths and physics. I truly appreciate the value in sciences, but understand the difficulty finding and retaining teachers for these subjects, especially when most of my Imperial cohort ended up as management consultants or in finance.
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
No one knows who wrote the laws of physics or where they come from. Science is based on testable, reproducible evidence, and so far we cannot test the universe before the Big Bang.
Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that’s a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.
I just think action films now have… often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don’t think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.
Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics.
When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.
The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
It’s gonna sound so boring to most people. There have been times when I’ve been told, ‘Oh, you’re doing an album about physics? I hope it’s not boring.’ They don’t get the idea. Because rappers are so one-dimensional, so narrow-minded, it comes off corny.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had an enormous interest in the sciences – everything from quantum physics to anthropology.
Whether it’s in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.
Semiconductor research and the Nobel Prize in physics seem to be contradictory since one may come to the conclusion that such a complicated system like a semiconductor is not useful for very fundamental discoveries.
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
There are good reasons why we don’t want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.
Someday, when the ultimate laws of physics are in our grasp, we may discover that the notion of time isn’t actually essential. Time might instead emerge to play an important role in the macroscopic world of our experience, even if it is nowhere to be found in the final Theory of Everything.
One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary – the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
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.
In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
I was the Chair of the first department of medical physics in a medical school in the U.S.
The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.
I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
I cannot quantify the physics of friendships and do not know exactly how much intense pressure can be applied before these glittery, brittle bonds break.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.
If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
I’m fascinated with quantum physics.
When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.
The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.
I work in string theory. This is a branch of physics which assumes that the elementary objects in the universe are not particles but one-dimensional objects, that is, strings.
I was so surprised because I’m not too sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize, you know, because basically, physics, it means that usually people was awarded for the invention of the basic theory. But in my case, not a basic theory, in my case just making the device, you know.
The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed without the aid of coordinates; and, indeed, their coordinate-free expressions are generally elegant and exceedingly powerful.
I’m definitely interested by a lot of things outside of music – technology, film, quantum physics – and I’m realizing that I can put my creativity into anything I kind of choose to.
It’s hardly a secret that I’m skeptical of declarations that the aliens are out and about on our planet. Still, I try to answer every one of these mails and phone calls because, after all, it’s not a violation of physics to travel from one star system to another.
I had a difficult time getting my arms around Einstein’s work, even when I was a physics major at one of the top universities in India.
Is the universe ‘elegant,’ as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant – if I only knew what they were.
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.
I studied physics at university, and I’m still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.
Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you’re lucky, you get strange clues.
People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.
Certainly to me it has been valuable to have to think through the basics of physics in order to present them in a halfway coherent form for a course. That has led me to ideas in research. Even freshman physics leads to thoughts that lead to other thoughts that are stimulating.
If someone is interested in medicine and also in physics and they like working with people and communicate well with others, I would strongly encourage them.
The State of Israel must be at the forefront of global science – in physics, in mathematics, in medicine, in biology.
I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.
My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Theoretical physics hardly requires any research funding, so I never felt the need. The overall government and institutional support has been good enough for my work.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
Although I liked especially physics and mathematics for which I had considerable talent, I decided to study medicine. This profession had for me a strong emotional appeal, which was reinforced by having an uncle who was an excellent surgeon.
Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.
I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison.
I knew I can teach physics well, so earning money from tuition was no struggle. The struggle was to earn money through acting.
Certainly by the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I had to have a long education if I wanted to become an astronomer, but I figured I’d try it, and if I didn’t get far enough, I could always end up teaching in high school or math or physics.
The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a universe made out of energy, everything is entangled; everything is one.
In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.
It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.
This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.
Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.
When I was in 7th grade, we were all given an exam. It was science and math, and the boys who did well were skipped ahead so that when they got to be juniors or seniors in high school they would be able to go to the local community college and take calculus and physics there. And I wasn’t skipped ahead.
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
When I received my B. S. degree in 1932, only two of the fundamental particles of physics were known.
Over the years, I began to understand that there were a lot of people out there reading physics in popular literature that they could not understand – not because it was too advanced, but because it wasn’t advanced enough.
My earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc.
Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What’s hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.
There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.
If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: ‘Be comforted, you and they shall live again.’
I got bored with the topic; I felt this was 19th century physics. I was wondering if there was still something profound that could be made with light microscopy. So I saw that the diffraction barrier was the only important problem that had been left over.
There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.
I went to the University of Washington as a physics and astronomy major. My other interest, of course, was aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot. And if you’re going to fly airplanes, the best place to be is the Air Force.
I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.
Einstein’s gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.
I’ve always really been into science, and in the last five years I’ve gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.
I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw – isn’t that wonderful – so I made up a false name.
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.
I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture – a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics.
Becoming a scientist is a long journey, and at every step, I found projects that were exciting, motivating me to continue. My path was not straightforward – when I began studying physics in college, I had no idea I would end up studying asteroids; in fact, I never took an astronomy class.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.
The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.
The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.
Children need to be exploring their physical world. They need to be learning the fundamental laws of physics by manipulating objects.
I think my father, who was Chinese, basically felt if we didn’t major in science, we would starve on the streets, so we all went into science unquestioningly. I kind of faked my way through physics.
I was always good at math and science and physics.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can’t talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.
I thought I should study physics because it’s fundamental to all science.
That’s the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it’s not like chemistry or physics.
While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time.
In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn’t good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don’t know how they choose what to do.
I took physics, and lo and behold, there’s a lot of physics in ‘Lost.’ I think for most people, liberal arts educations are more abstract, but for me, it’s been a chance to apply the things I’ve learned more directly. I also took some Folklore and Mythology classes, and I think that a lot of that influenced me.
I think telepathy exists, and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties.
Physics has the cutest words.
The parts of physics that are exact are the parts of physics that are exact. The parts that are inexact are vastly greater. Sensible scientists don’t waste their time pushing against doors that endlessly will not give. They are opportunistic and go where they can, but there are pitfalls in that.
Fascinated by history during my secondary education, then by physics and mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique, I finally entered the national administration of mines in 1936.
I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.
I’m the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys’ school in Sydney.
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I’d convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.
Since childhood I’ve been very bad with formulas in math, physics.
Since early childhood, I’ve been trying to learn all I can. Science is everything; it’s not just physics. It’s the way of understanding your environment, the world around you.
There’s a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.
Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.
I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.
I’m a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don’t really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.
I have devoted much time and energy to helping medical physics in developing countries.
The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.
I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology.
When I run, I think about everything: physics, family problems, plans for the weekend. I haven’t made any big discoveries on a run, but it does give me time to think through problems. Some solutions are obvious, but they are only obvious when you are relaxed enough to find them.
I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.
Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.
We all hate on ourselves way too much, and there are so many people who think they have to look like those women on TV. That’s so unreasonable. Everybody is supposed to be a different size. And if I can just be confident in myself, then I’ll look better. It’s quantum physics!
I’ve talked to ghosts once. For me, it makes sense for them to be real because of physics. In physics, you can’t destroy energy; it can only be conserved.
There’s no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society – in fact, quite the opposite. The planet’s ready to work with us if we’re ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.
There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don’t involve the use of a laser.
I went to engineering school, I went to physics class. I said, ‘Screw this, I don’t want to be here. I’d much rather be at a club playing music.’
Most people don’t have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.
They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.
The jury is not in, so we just don’t know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That’s sad, that’s unfortunate, but that’s the direction in which things are pointing.
Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g ‘witch doctor’) to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).
So Whitehead’s metaphysics doesn’t fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
If a female student wants to drop a physics course, no one questions her, but if a male student tries to drop it, he will get pushback and encouraged to stay in, since he will need it later in life.
The three-body problem is a term borrowed from physics. It is a phenomenon that can basically be explained like this: Two objects in space can interact in a predictable fashion rotating around each other due to their gravitational pull. But if a third object is introduced, it makes their interaction more complicated.
My first job out of school was to do basic research at Johns Hopkins University’s applied physics lab.
Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me – it was the sublime quality of patience – patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment – which I sadly lacked.
There is no way to physically always be there for your children and always be at the office and always be present for your significant other and then take care of yourself. The laws of physics necessitate that somebody or some thing is going to get the short end of the stick.
As for me, I want to have fun while I’m working. Now not everyone thinks physics is fun, but I do. I think experimental physics is especially fun, because not only do you get to solve puzzles about the universe or on Earth, there are really cool toys in the lab.
At school, I got into the whole CB thing, hiding a transceiver in my study-bedroom with which I’d make appointments to meet girls in town. I wasn’t good enough at physics to take it much further than fun, but I suppose there was a need to communicate.
Ernest Rutherford’s 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn’t given for the nuclear power station – he wouldn’t have survived that long – it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can’t fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that’s just part of the structure.
We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth, and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.
The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we’re made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.
No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.
Thanks to the fact that the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, and invoking a bunch of Newtonian physics, you can deduce that our planet wobbles, too, taking roughly 26,000 years to trace out a small circle on the sky, a phenomenon known as precession.
Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
I was having a hard time getting interest from future employers because of my physics background. It seemed all anyone wanted was engineers.
Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
I have always enjoyed explaining physics. In fact it’s more than just enjoyment: I need to explain physics.
How many of you have broken no laws this month? That’s the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee – with physics and mathematics, not with laws – that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.
I studied physics as an undergraduate, and after I graduated from Rice University, I was actually hired at the Johnson Space Center as a flight controller.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it’s a very small percentage of the total. That’s been changing in the last few years.
I come home from trying to pretend to know about astronomy and physics all day and turn on ‘The Real Housewives’.
The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us.
The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.
I gained a first class degree in Physics at Imperial College London in 1968 and did research in solid state physics, but did not pursue meteorology matters until gaining an M.Sc. in astrophysics from Queen Mary College London in 1981, after which I investigated and attempted to construct theories of solar activity.
It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
The goddess Physics was Stephen’s idol. I was not jealous of her, but she did give me some cause for concern.
The amount of subtle and beautiful physics that’s necessary to make a smartphone work is enormous.
Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don’t think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.
Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.
We are building a company, Gemini, and the ETF, which is another company. I don’t know if we’re experts, but the goal is not to be an expert but to change the world. Does Richard Branson understand all the physics behind his space craft? I’m not sure.
Symmetries are the playing field on which the physical world works and which determine the rules of the game. The symmetries of nature determine for us things that remain constant, that can’t be changed. Those are the guideposts in physics, the quantities like energy and momentum.
The idea of a computer winning the Nobel Prize for physics is not too unlikely, citing a computer as joint recipient. It’s obviously not a huge leap to think of something similar happening in fiction.
I got into physics through pop science and quantum science and ended up being such a quantum groupie.
You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I’m allowed to.
McMaster had an engineering physics program and… one of the parts of it was lasers and electro-optics and I just said, ‘Now doesn’t that sound cool. I just got to do that.’
Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
I have passed English medical examinations in Hong Kong… In my youth, I experienced overseas studies. The languages of the West, its literature, its political science, its customs, its mathematics, its geography, its physics and chemistry – all these I have had the chance to study.
Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it’s possible, so why not?
I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics. The birth of a baby and the blooming of a flower are natural events, but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of either.
You watch an old ‘Jeopardy!’ and the categories alone are very plain. ‘Poetry,’ or ‘Movies,’ or ‘Physics.’ If you watch it now, though, there’ll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.
I had a project for my life which involved 10 years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics.
I’ve been around golf my whole life. My father did it all the time, and I resented him for it. But a couple years ago I picked up a golf club and I understood the physics of it. If anyone knows anything about golf, it’s that once you hit a few shots, you’ll become addicted.
I’d love to go back to Europe in the ’20s and ’30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.
It is just physics – who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?
When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don’t believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.
Following graduation from high school in 1948, I attended Harvard University where I became a physics major. Having grown up in a small town, I found Harvard to be an enormously enriching experience. Students in my class came from all walks of life and from a great variety of geographical locations.
I had imagined doing nuclear physics and cosmic ray work in greater style in peace time. To do modern physics in a small way is of no use of all.
Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.
The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
The detection of gravitational waves is truly a triumph of modern large-scale experimental physics.
During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics I had learned.
Life is strong and fragile. It’s a paradox… It’s both things, like quantum physics: It’s a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.
I’ve always been fascinated by quantum physics and the possibility of alternate realities.
My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.
Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn’t make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don’t have our physics quite right.
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.
After I finished my degree in India in 1980, I came to the U.S. to get a master’s, and I was teaching quantum physics to freshmen. As I got my bearings as to what goes on in labs, I understood that to teach, you have to learn.
We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.
The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn’t about aptitude.
Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.
