Quotes About Physics

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Whereas, all that is happening is the Earth is following a straight line in curved space.

A time dimension is required so that energy is possible.

As the great physicist John Wheeler said: "To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another: 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?

As we move about in space, we are also moving forward in time. This means we effectively navigate a path through spacetime called a world line.

Just like a wine glass breaking, or a car rusting, the entropy of a closed system will always increase with time.

If a loved one dies, you might take some comfort from the knowledge that this period of time in which your loved one is dead has, in fact, no greater reality than the time when your loved one was alive. According to physics, it is just as valid to consider your loved one as alive as it is to consider them dead!

Galileo stated that there was no experiment you could possibly perform which could detect if you were stationary or moving at a constant velocity. This unification of "being stationary" and "moving" stands as the first of the great unifications in physics.

the two forces of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force were, in fact, the same force behaving in two different ways at our everyday low energies. If it is sufficiently hot enough then the electromagnetic force and the weak force would merge into a single force. This was confirmed in the 1980s in CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, when they recreated the temperature of the early universe and demonstrated the existence of the so-called electroweak force.

you would expect that at the ultimate base of Nature, we will surely find a principle which is simple, beautiful, and elegant. As the great physicist John Wheeler said: "To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another: 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?

Whenever we warm our hands by the fire, we allow the energy radiated by the fire to quicken up the movements of the atoms of which the hands are composed. When we cool any substance, we check those movements.

In this case, the particle formed has correspondingly less energy, whereas the product nucleus passes into the ground state with emission of the quantity of energy saved as gamma radiation.

Even in technology, you have the freedom to solve a problem your way, you see. But it naturally sits in a certain framework whereas, in the physics, everybody had to come up with his own idea what he was going to do.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.

The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle.

Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.

One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.

Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

When you drive your car, E = mc2 is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula.

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven.

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.