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.
