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.
