Quotes About Physics

Soviet physicists realized in 1940 that the United States must also be pursuing a program when the names of prominent physicists, chemists, metallurgists and mathematicians disappeared from international journals: secrecy itself gave the secret away.

By 1942 the Cornell physicist had established himself as a theoretician of the first rank. His most outstanding contribution, for which he would receive the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics, was to elucidate the production of energy in stars, identifying a cycle of thermonuclear reactions involving hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that is catalyzed by carbon and culminates in the creation of helium.

Each kilogram of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons TNT equivalent.1622 Theoretically, 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen—26 pounds—ignited by one atomic bomb would explode with a force equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT.

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.

In further experiments with permanent magnets and coils, he obtained a consistent result: only when the magnet was moved briskly in relation to the coil did the galvanometer's needle move.

By 1933, with a departmental budget above $2,000 a year, ten times the budget of most Italian physics departments

an excessive and unproductive deference of British physics students to their seniors. He therefore founded a club, the

Alternating current had a massive advantage over direct current: it could be transformed easily into a higher or lower voltage. Voltage, like water pressure, moves electric charge. Amperage, like water volume, delivers more charge. The two qualities interact inversely. Stepping up voltage reduces amperage. Stepping up voltage allows alternating current to flow on wires of smaller diameter without encountering as much energy-sapping resistance.

One of Oppenheimer's students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that "when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

Planck solved the radiation problem by proposing that the vibrating particles can only radiate at certain energies.

Gamma rays could deflect electrons, a phenomenon known as the Compton effect after its discoverer, the American experimental physicist Arthur Holly Compton, but a proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron and not easily moved.

But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency.

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden.

They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.

Allison began broadcasting the countdown. Richard Feynman, a future Nobel laureate who had entered physics as an adolescent via radio tinkering, tinkered the radio to life. Men began moving into position. "We were told to lie down on the sand," Teller protests, "turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.

Fermi sent them out again in the early 1930s, after the decision to go into nuclear physics: Segrè to work with Otto Stern in Hamburg, Amaldi to Leipzig to the laboratory of the physical chemist Peter Debye, Rasetti to Lise Meitner at the KWI.

Arnold Sommerfeld hailed the Compton effect—elastic scattering of a photon by an electron—as "probably the most important discovery which could have been made in the current state of physics" because it proved that photons exist, which hardly anyone in 1923 yet believed, and demonstrated clearly the dual nature of light as both particle and wave.

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world's first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.

Mountain climbing had long been a Hans Bethe hobby. He and Fermi, among others, sometimes scaled Lake Peak across the Rio Grande in the Sangre de Cristos, one of Bethe's admiring group leaders remembers, to "sit there in the sunshine" at 12,500 feet "discussing physics problems. This is how many discoveries were made.

few of the fathers of physicists were businessmen.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.

Of course, even without my help, other forces would keep the cosmos chugging along. Many different belief systems powered the revolution of the planets and stars. Wolves would still chase Sol across the sky. Ra would continue his daily journey in his sun barque. Tonatiuh would keep running on his surplus blood from human sacrifices back in the Aztec days. And that other thing—science— would still generate gravity and quantum physics or whatever.

Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.