Quotes About Physics

The physics are simple in theory, but in practice they are filled with the possibility for limitless error.

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.

Cautiously he ventured to suggest that the Fatherland had injured its cause by the exiling of able Jewish scientists. The German agreed and revealed in confidence that the greatest theoretical physicist in the world—so he called Werner Heisenberg—had ventured to approach no less a person than Reichsminister Himmler on the subject of the ban against the teaching of the Einstein theory of relativity in German universities.

The SI specifies seven fundamental measures: length, mass, time, electric current, temperature, amount of substance, and luminous intensity.

Among the great twentieth-century advances I cannot think of a better example than the first patent for a solid-state electronic device, granted to the German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first in Canada in 1925 and then in the US in 1926.

Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy" (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).

Heat thus occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of energies: all other forms of energy can be completely converted to it, but its conversion into other forms can never be complete, as only a portion of the initial input ends up in the new form.

Energy is not a single, easily definable entity, but rather an abstract collective concept, adopted by nineteenth-century physicists to cover a variety of natural and anthropogenic (generated by humans) phenomena. Its most commonly encountered forms are heat (thermal energy), motion (kinetic or mechanical energy), light (electromagnetic energy) and the chemical energy of fuels and foodstuffs.

The scientific definition of power is simply the rate of energy use: power equals energy per time, or ML2/T3

There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?

he was actually a key person in Halabi's orbit. His educational background is in physics but he seems to be knowledgeable in pretty much anything relating to technology.

It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics- where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.

Some things are always simple. Magnets, for example.

Gods of math and physics," she intoned, "I accept your gift of this clever, fair-haired boy.

about how when you're not looking it's a wave, and then when you are looking it's a particle. Like it's not actual matter till you look at it. And the thing about quantum superpositioning? How one thing can be in more than one place at the same time but still have the same reaction to some kind of stimulus even if the two things are miles apart, because it's not two things, it's one thing in two places?

God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice.

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.

Metaphysics, whatever it may be, seems still to lead men astray much more than any physics.

Todas las ciencias se reducen a la física, y la física se puede ahora reducir a una sola fórmula.

Se você é jovem, inteligente e se interessa por política, pense bem antes de estudar ciências políticas na universidade. Você deveria se interessar, em vez disso, em estudar matemática ou física. Num segundo momento você poderá entrar na política e terá conhecimentos mais úteis, com aplicações infinitas [...] Pode-se sempre ler livros de história mais tarde, mas não é possível aprender matemática na hora que se quer.

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

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.

Cats are adorable violations of the laws of physics.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Nothing, that is, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.