Quotes About Physics

Does quantum physics really say, he asked, that the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it? He found the idea that matter was described by probabilities especially upsetting. "God does not play dice with the universe!" he declared. To which Bohr supposedly replied, "Albert, don't tell God what to do.

But there was one thing more about quantum physics that thoroughly annoyed most of the scientists who truly understood its implications. Because it dealt so intimately with the nature of matter—and reality—quantum physics also had quite a few things to say about things that, until recently, were strictly the preserve, not of physics, but of metaphysics . . . of religion, and—whisper it softly—of philosophy.11

Physicist Pascual Jordan added, "We ourselves produce the results of measurement." And, by extension, he meant reality itself.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is reported to have said, "Whenever I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I want to reach for my gun.

Ask a physics teacher: Why do elementary particles exist? Is it impossible for them not to exist? (Be prepared for the possibility that your physics teacher doesn't want to have this conversation.)

Even though we may not like it, concludes Davies, we must say on the basis of the thermodynamic properties of the universe that the universe's energy was somehow simply "put in" at the creation as an initial condition.118 Prior to the creation, says Davies, the universe simply did not exist.

The image of the fundamental laws of physics zestfully wrestling with the void to bring the universe into being is one that suggests very little improvement over the accounts given by the ancient Norse in which the world is revealed to be balanced on the back of a gigantic ox.

Place the tip of a stick in a clear brook and you'll see it "bend" underwater because the speed of light is literally slower beneath the surface than it is in air.

The accumulated research into quantum physics has begun to explain how the mind, or consciousness, has always played a major role in determining our particular experience of reality.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

El tiempo no transcurre. Otros tiempos son, simplemente, casos especiales de otros universos.

Even a typical star converts millions of tonnes of mass into energy every second, with each gram releasing as much energy as an atom bomb.

Now, when you hear some people advocating or warning against "geoengineering" Earth by spraying sun-blocking aerosols into the upper atmosphere, they are proposing to induce a process that is constantly at work on Titan. I'll return to the physics, and the wisdom, of such an anti-greenhouse project in chapter 4. Climate

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.

Under enemy-alien status, as his biographer Robert Chadwell Williams has pointed out, he could not own a car or join a British Civil Defense team, but he could in time work on the most secret aspects of atomic physics.

The perfect philosophy of the natural kind [= the perfect physics] only staves off our ignorance a little longer; just as, perhaps, the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind [= the most perfect philosophy, in the 21st century sense of the word] serves only to show us more of how ignorant we are. So both kinds of philosophy eventually lead us to a view of human blindness and weakness—a view that confronts us at every turn despite our attempts to get away from it.

the earliest battles flared between himself and fellow physicist Leonard Susskind over whether quantum mechanics implied that information could leak out of black holes.

The problem with riding over your head is that the laws of physics are self-enforcing.

My point is that the actual height of the CoG is only a concern when you are balancing at a stop or pushing the bike out of the garage. In motion, front-end geometry has a lot more to do with how the bike balances. And

When the noise died down, she could lose herself in mathematics—in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity—and forget the world around her.