Quotes About Physics

The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations that hold true for all systems of coordinates, that is they are covariant with respect to any substitutions whatever.

If Albert Einstein, the last century's very poster boy for the cunning man and the wild-haired magician of science, knew one thing, then it was simply that there was always more to be known. He didn't pridefully condemn dreams of physics and incomplete theories. He pointed off into the future and named the unknown things as, in fact, spooky action at a distance.

All those lateral G's. Vertical G's!

The sciences form a hierarchy. "Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology," wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.

Her love for him is not something that can be changed— it's physics, not emotion: It's the exact weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.

All those stories about time travel, they were comforting, and at the same time it bothered me how they always made it seem fun and how everything fit into place, how things could only ever be how they were supposed to be, how the heroes found a way to change the world while still obeying the laws of physics.

The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing force--or the slow resistance of friction--stops it at last.

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a "Newtonian" or of a biologist when asked if he is a "Pasteurian.

If it's green or wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics.

The law of conservation of energy, reborn as the law of conservation of mass/energy, has established itself as one of the few unshakable theoretical guideposts in the wilderness of the world of our sense experiences. In scope and generality it surpasses Newton's laws of motion, Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, and even Einstein's potent little E=mc². It comes as close to an absolute truth as our uncertain age will permit.

Physicists now know that 70 per cent of the known universe is dark energy. Dark matter is another 25 per cent. Once we thought we knew all about life, but it turns out everything we think of as reality is less than 5 per cent.

The laws of physics suggest we cannot go in one direction forever. Sooner or later, something will slow us down. Whether it be stocks, housing prices, economies, or entire civilizations, even the biggest boom stall. We build castles, churches, and monuments believing they will last forever; our perception of solidity often belies an underlying movement that is difficult to perceive. Sometimes we can see the wave of change coming. But more often we are swept along in it.

every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.

The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

A new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first- century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.

But another possibility is that a neutron star's center contains exotic particles called kaons. This would lower the critical mass compared

Any feature of the world at a future time can be computed from the configuration of the present. That is, the passage of time can be replaced by a computation, which means that the future is logically a consequence of the present.

Recent measurements reveal a universe consisting mostly of the unknown. Fully 70 percent of the matter density appears to be in the form of dark energy. Twenty-six percent is dark matter. Only 4 percent is ordinary matter. So less than 1 part in 20 is made out of matter we have observed experimentally or described in the standard model of particle physics. Of the other 96 percent, apart from the properties just mentioned, we know absolutely nothing.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

In 1914, a Finnish physicist named Gunnar Nordstrom found that all you had to do to unify gravity with electromagnetism was increase the dimensions of space by one. He wrote the equations that describe electromagnetism in a world with four dimensions of space (and one of time), and out popped gravity. Just by the extra dimension of space, you got a unification of gravity with electromagnetism that was also perfectly consistent with Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The wavelength of a lightwave limits how small a thing you can see, for you cannot resolve an object smaller than the wavelength of the light you use to see it. Hence, one cannot detect the existence of an extra dimension smaller than the wavelength of light one can perceive.

Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.