Quotes About Physics

I've never believed in wormholes," Fatima confessed. "Take two in relative motion and you've got a time machine. And I definitely don't believe in time machines." -"Maybe you can believe in just one wormhole at a time," Gabrielle replied, deadpan.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

L'infinito dei fisici è un cattivo infinito perché non è che il senza fine del finito

we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

Scaling also became part of a movement in physics that led, more directly than Mandelbrot's own work, to the discipline known as chaos.

In space, free of friction, periodic motion comes from the orbits of heavenly bodies, but on earth virtually any regular oscillation comes from some cousin of the pendulum. Basic electronic circuits are described by equations exactly the same as those describing a swinging bob. The electronic oscillations are millions of times faster, but the physics is the same.

As the physicist Murray Gell-Mann once remarked: "Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to the mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to the physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around.

Fluid dynamicists just did not believe them. They were not accustomed to experiments in the precise style of phase-transition physics.

Where Newton was reductionist, Goethe was holistic. Newton broke light apart and found the most basic physical explanation for color. Goethe walked through flower gardens and studied paintings, looking for a grand, all-encompassing explanation. Newton made his theory of color fit a mathematical scheme for all of physics. Goethe, fortunately or unfortunately, abhorred mathematics.

He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, "If I were an electron, what would I do?

A system like a globular cluster is far too complex to be treated directly as a many-body problem, but its dynamics can be studied with the help of certain compromises.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error.

In physics there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model... The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.

Like other physicists, Feigenbaum used an understated, tough-guy vocabulary to rate such problems. Such a thing is obvious, he might say, meaning that a result could be understood by any skilled physicist after appropriate contemplation and calculation. Not obvious described work that commanded respect and Nobel prizes. For the hardest problems, the problems that would not give way without long looks into the universe's bowels, physicists reserved words like deep.

In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.

Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation." Forces

Feynman—mystifyingly brilliant at calculating, strangely ignorant of the literature, passionate about physics, reckless about proof—had for once overestimated his ability to charm and persuade these great physicists.

In theory the World War II atomic bomb project was a problem in nuclear physics. In reality the nuclear physics had been mostly solved before the project began, and the business that occupied the scientists assembled at Los Alamos was a problem in fluid dynamics.

But Yorke had offered more than a mathematical result. He had sent a message to physicists: Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured. He also gave reason to believe that complicated systems, traditionally modeled by hard continuous differential equations, could be understood in terms of easy discrete maps.

In reasonably simple form, galactic orbits can be treated like the orbits of planets around a sun, with one exception: the central gravity source is not a point, but a disk with thickness in three dimensions.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

It may prove useful in physics," he wrote, "to consider events in all of time at once and to imagine that we at each instant are only aware of those that lie behind us.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!