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.
