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Physicist quotes
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens.
—
Albert Einstein
Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws.
—
Stephen Hawking
religion
is my friend —is my friend — but my greatest friend is .
—
Isaac Newton
friend
In the last analysis, we ourselves are part ofand therefore part of thethat we are trying to solve.
—
Max Planck
art
The old , such as the relation ofand , are still with us, and Ipresent as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.
—
Richard Feynman
present
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
—
William Thomson
knowledge
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.
—
Hannes Alfven
war
I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.
—
Philip Warren Anderson
art
My earlier award was also based on a close collaborative effort.
—
John Bardeen
war
We are all dwellers on this one small earth; we live one life, die one death; we have the same difficulties to contend with; we ought in common to fight the foes of ignorance and wrong.
—
Charles Glover Barkla
life
It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
—
Daniel Bernoulli
art
Thanking you once more, I want to wish you the best of luck for your future life and to conclude by saying to you: Dream your dreams and may they come true!
—
Felix Bloch
life
During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.
—
David Bohm
art
I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.
—
Max Born
philosophy
Direction coupling between the various radiations generated in a nuclear reaction both with one another and with the initiating radiation can also be detected and measured by coincidences; this provides valuable information about the structure of the atomic nuclei.
—
Walther Bothe
action
It is a great honor to be awarded a Nobel Prize. This is a wonderful experience for my wife Betty and me. We received congratulations by email, phone and post, many from old friends we had not seen for some time.
—
Willard Boyle
war
Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision ten thousand times, and we can now 'see' the individual atoms and molecules.
—
William Henry Bragg
time
The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.
—
Owen Chamberlain
science
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.
—
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
time
Geometry was the first exciting course I remember.
—
Steven Chu
After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.
—
Eric Allin Cornell
wit
On even the worst days, when nothing was working at the lab, I knew that at home I would find warmth, peace, companionship, and encouragement. As a consequence, the next day would surely be better.
—
James Cronin
war
Is it right to probe so deeply into Nature's secrets? The question must here be raised whether it will benefit mankind, or whether the knowledge will be harmful.
—
Pierre Curie
knowledge
The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave, and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.
—
Louis de Broglie
sin
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
—
Paul Dirac
world
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
—
Freeman Dyson
life
The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
—
Michael Faraday
The fundamental point in fabricating a chain reacting machine is of course to see to it that each fission produces a certain number of neutrons and some of these neutrons will again produce fission.
—
Enrico Fermi
men
The phenomenon develops calmly, but it is invisible, unstoppable. One feels, one sees it born and grow steadily; and it is not in one's power to either hasten or slow it down.
—
Leon Foucault
power
While it was a very interesting period in my life, I was happy to get back to more direct contact with students in the classroom and in my research projects.
—
Jerome Isaac Friedman
life
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
—
Dennis Gabor
art
Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
—
Murray Gell Mann
men
In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.
—
William Gilbert
men
Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.
—
Brian Greene
life
We thought it would be nice to have atoms interact in such a gentle way with the photons that they would just take an imprint of the photons, so that many atoms could 'see' the same photon and it would give rise to a lot of interesting effects. Myself and my colleagues had this project for a very long time and we were finally able to observe it.
—
Serge Haroche
time
The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.
—
Werner Heisenberg
art
A moving body whose motion was not retarded by any resisting force would continue to move to all eternity.
—
Hermann von Helmholtz
body
The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest.
—
Victor Francis Hess
living
In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking's comments. I said one shouldn't pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.
—
Peter Higgs
art
The Nobel Prize is given as a personal award but it also honors the field of research in which I have worked and it also honors my students and colleagues.
—
Robert Hofstadter
war
Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question. Science has no answer to it.
—
Erwin Schrödinger
great
Order is manifestly maintained in the universe... governed by the sovereign will of God.
—
James Prescott Joule
man
Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.
—
Michio Kaku
nature
I must confess that, at that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the slowness of the relaxation processes in the ground state, processes which take place in collisions with the wall or with the molecules of a foreign gas.
—
Alfred Kastler
knowledge
I have to ask Allahs forgiveness and not get angry, because they come to me out of love, and its not fitting that I should turn to them in hatred.
—
Abdul Qadeer Khan
love
I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.
—
Walter Kohn
family
To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
—
Polykarp Kusch
life
For as long as one has no further point of reference, apart from the position of the maximum, the wavelength thus remains uncertain by an integral factor.
—
Max Von Laue
art
Liquid helium belongs to a class of fluids known as quantum fluids, as distinct from classical fluids.
—
David Lee
Life is short and progress is slow.
—
Gabriel Lippmann
progress
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
—
Ernst Mach
world
My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teachers family.
—
Simon Van Der Meer
family
Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance; and that is always conducive to humility and reverence.
—
Robert Andrews Millikan
knowledge
But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
—
Roger Penrose
beauty
Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
—
Martin Lewis Perl
education
If youre puzzled by what dark energy is, youre in good company.
—
Saul Perlmutter
good
Those placed in the position which I now occupy, commonly feel concern about their worthiness to receive the great honour which has been done them.
—
Cecil Frank Powell
great
In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.
—
James Rainwater
school
Among my activities was membership in the Boy Scouts; I rose each year through the ranks, eventually achieving the rank of Eagle Scout and undertaking leadership roles in the organization.
—
Frederick Reines
leadership
I did not take a calculus course until my second year of college.
—
Robert Coleman Richardson
college
Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.
—
Burton Richter
science
The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.
—
Joseph Rotblat
thinking
Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.
—
Andrei Sakharov
belief
Scientific thought and its creation is the common and shared heritage of mankind.
—
Abdus Salam
man
When people really understand the Big Bang and the whole sweep of the evolution of the universe, it will be clear that humans are fairly insignificant.
—
George Smoot
people
The views of the European Union are fully reflected in this text, particularly the key objective of the EU, namely vigorously to address the disarmament of Iraq and to do so within the framework of the UN Security Council.
—
Javier Solana
art
At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.
—
Johannes Stark
art
I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose.
—
Jack Steinberger
hate
We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.
—
Leo Szilard
world
The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.
—
Edward Teller
science
Many have argued that a vacuum does not exist, others claim it exists only with difficulty in spite of the repugnance of nature; I know of no one who claims it easily exists without any resistance from nature.
—
Evangelista Torricelli
nature
Science has faith. We make postulates. We cant prove those postulates, but we have faith in them.
—
Charles Hard Townes
faith
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
—
Steven Weinberg
universe
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
—
John Archibald Wheeler
strange
Since we can produce all types of light by means of hot bodies, we can ascribe, to the radiation in thermal equilibrium with hot bodies, the temperature of these bodies, and thus every radiation, even that issuing from a phosphorescent body, has a certain temperature for every colour.
—
Wilhelm Wien
light
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.
—
Eugene Wigner
nature
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
—
Maurice Wilkins
life
We know a lot of things, but what we dont know is a lot more.
—
Edward Witten
Einsteins theory has the very highest degree of æsthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions astonishing. It is a case of an advance arrived at by pure theory: the whole effect of Einsteins work is to make physics more philosophical in a good sense, and to restore some of that intellectual unity which belonged to the great scientific systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which was lost through increasing specialization and the overwhelming mass of detailed knowledge. In some ways our age is not a good one to live in, but for those who are interested in physics there are great compensations.
—
Hendrik Lorentz
love
On the basis of Lorentzs theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron.
—
Pieter Zeeman
sin
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