Quotes About Physics

In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.

Sci-fi has never really been my bag. But I do believe in a lot of weird things these days, such as synchronicity. Quantum physics suggests it's possible, so why not?

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.

I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.

It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

I have a tendency, more than most other physicists, to try to figure out everything all at once, before I publish. And even to try to figure out everything in my head, without pencil and paper.

While classical mechanics correctly predicts the behavior of large objects such as tennis balls, to predict the behavior of small objects such as electrons, we must use quantum mechanics.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

If you have never read about quantum mechanics before (perhaps even if you have), you will no doubt find it confusing, maybe incomprehensible. If you do, take heart! As the brilliant (and Nobel prize-winning) physicist Richard Feynman put it: It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That's because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

Two phenomena in particular triggered the quantum revolution: the photoelectric effect and the structure of the atom.

Quantum mechanics completely overturned the classical worldview.

If this sounds unbearably paradoxical, maybe you should quit reading here, because this won't be the last time we find paradox in Buddhist practice or Buddhist teachings. Then again, there's paradoxical stuff in modern physics (an electron is both a particle and a wave), and modern physics works fine.

Natural law says that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but that was pre-spanx.

So in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it's time that's absolute.

Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said Fuck it and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.