Quotes About Physics

Irigaray was my favourite. She denounced Einstein's E = mc2 as a sexist equation which 'privileges the speed of light' over more feminine speeds 'which are vitally necessary to us'. Presumably, light might have appeased her if it had shown its feminine side by slowing down to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas.)

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.

To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality.

Die marxistische Soziologie ist die aristotelische Physik der Sozialwissenschaften.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. 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...

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

The expression e=mc2 is the ultimate statement in bounce per ounce.

What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.

The place of the study of communication in the history of science is neither trivial, fortuitous, nor new. Even before Newton such problems were current in physics, especially in the work of Fermat, Huygens, and Leibnitz, each of whom shared an interest in physics whose focus was not mechanics but optics, the communication of visual images.

A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth.

On the walls hung black-and-white portraits of men—it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Sk?odowska Curie's, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes. These

Archimedes, one of the greatest men of science there has ever been, and the father of physics.

4. That if the earth moved, or even revolved on its own axis, a stone or other dropped body ought to be left far behind.

It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks — being statics and not dynamics — neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.

For Einstein, as for Gödel, philosophy without ontology was an illusion, and physics without philosophy reduced to engineering.

You, making the assumption that you're an average-size human being, contain no less than 7 times 10 to the 18th (7 1018) joules of potential energy.

Two plus two always equals four. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Your every thought always affects physical reality.

Energy is liberated matter, and matter is energy waiting to happen.

I had a perfectly serviceable bike, but I rarely got to use it because it was a regular motorcycle and therefore too slow. My travel speed was too limited by things like traffic, weather, and the laws of physics. The rest of Nemesis and Co. didn't share my limitations. Apparently,

The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen

In the absence of experimental evidence, basic beliefs of theoretical physicists may initially have almost a religious flavor, guided by faith and aesthetics. Fortunately unlike religion, these beliefs soon face the hard test of experiment.

The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things.