Quotes About Physics

one's universe would appear very different from the vast bulk of space around it, which would still be inflating. In this picture, inflation is eternal. Some regions, indeed most of space, will go on inflating forever.

the remaining 70 percent of the total energy in the universe resided not in any form of matter, but rather in empty space itself.

Audibility decays according to the inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet.

Tiempo. La distancia dividida por la velocidad es igual al tiempo».

m equals e divided by c2

The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification.

By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn't believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.

Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.

if physics is much simpler to describe under the assumption that space is discrete, rather than continuous, is not this fact itself a strong argument for space being discrete? If so, then might space look, on some very small scale, something like Wilson's lattice.

There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar. This appellation was not meant ironically.

Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound.

The dark-matter hypothesis is preferred mostly because the only other possibility—that we are wrong about Newton's laws, and by extension general relativity—is too scary to contemplate.

These two discoveries, of relativity and of the quantum, each required us to break definitively with Newtonian physics. However, in spite of great progress over the century, they remain incomplete. Each has defects that point to a deeper theory. But the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other.

Take the expansion rate of the universe, which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction--a little faster, a little slower--we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life. ~Stephen C. Meyer, PHD~

This book is addressed to those who for whatever reason believe that students of political science must have some understanding of the philosophic treatment of the abiding questions; to those who do not believe that political science is scientific as chemistry and physics are — subjects from which their own history is excluded.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

Upon learning of the young man's interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, "In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.

Heisenberg, who was attempting to hold German physics together, resented Schrödinger's departure, "since he was neither Jewish nor otherwise endangered.

We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe.

Let all the disciples of Aristotle…," he would write, "recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics."6

Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new "social physics" describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet's analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state of motion, so the mass behavior of people, if social conditions remain unchanged, remains constant.

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.