Quotes About Physics

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato . In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all surfers know in their bowels, whether or not they've heard the formula.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

Gravity is the curvature of space.

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. —NIELS BOHR DETERMINISM—THE

Physicists, irrespective of their belief, may invoke God when they feel issues of principle are at stake because the God of the physicists is cosmic order.

Ich war so was wie ein Wunderkind in Sachen Physik und Mathematik, wollte Kernphysiker werden, habe dann aber über den Schriftsteller Hans Henny Jahnn promoviert. Ich habe sämtliche meiner Karrieren zerstört, bevor sie anfingen. Das mache ich immer noch so.

Any space that distinguishes directions and accelerations cannot be "empty", in Aristotle's meaning.

The space that is added as the universe expands has the same properties-curvature, energy density-as the parent space.

The vacuum of physics contains in its faculties everything that the laws of nature will permit. It fluctuates-the virtual particles come and go. The only thing they may be missing is the energy it would take to make them appear as real particles. All that can appear in reality must be present as a possibility- as a state of virtual particles-in a vacuum. Addd energy to the vacuum and those virtual states may appear as particles.

The quantity that physicists call the specific heat of a substance is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 g of this substance by 1 degree Celsius.

The oscillations-or waves-mandated by the Goldstone theorem originate in the application of symmetry operations to small domains.

In physics terms, the reason for symmetry breaking is the instability of the symmetric state.

Light is an excitation of empty space proper, of the vacuum. It is no more and no less.

At the end of inflation, just as after the hot Big Bang, the universe is hot. It is, we might say, self-created by dint of its explosive growth: The inflationary process generates space, and the energy that space contains, from essentially nothing. To repeat Alan Guth's dictum, "The universe may be the ultimate free lunch.

While the effective electrical charge of a proton decreases with distance, the strength of the effective color charge of a quark increases with distance.

Once the thermal radiation reaches the surface temperature of the Sun-some 6000 degrees Celsius-we perceive it as white light. At still higher temperatures, 8500 degrees Celsius, the light will be blue. Beyond this, thermal radiation passes into the X-ray range. And so it goes, ad infinitum: the higher the temperature, the higher the frequency of thermal radiation.

The uncertainty relation tells us that an infinitely large energy corresponds to infinitely small distances.

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.

Which of the two possibilities corresponds to reality is simply unknown until a definite measurement is made, at which point the quantum state instantaneously changes to reflect the result of that measurement.

Leon M. Lederman