Quotes About Physics

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence.

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.

We have an amazing engineering team in the company pushing the limits of device physics and some great partners in manufacturing.

Sure, nobody will make a fortune if we figure out why the Big Bang happened. But just about everyone would like to know.

Colors come from a phenomenon called scattering. The wavelengths of light and the size of the particles determine the colors.

Our inability to see atoms has to do with the fact that light acts like a wave, and waves do not scatter easily from small objects. To see a thing, the wavelength of the beam must be smaller than it is.

minus 340° Kelvin

The antiparticle of any particle has the same mass as the particle, and the same spin. But the antiparticle has the opposite charge.

quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics.

We are no exception: the physical laws apply to everything.

As we shall see in the next section, however, all fundamental particles have zero mass. A zero-mass particle necessarily moves at the speed of light.

Determinism in relativistic quantum mechanics is called unitarity. Determinism in all forms of physics is concerned with time evolution.

there would be an infinite amount of such time between now and the Omega Point.

we can think of determinism as working backward as well as forward in time.

I'm proud of the fact that I thought of the solar wind. It was an exercise in pursuing curiosity, which is the main motivation for studying physics from a personal standpoint.

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?

The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

Gravity wins over all other known forces.

I founded an educational software company called Knowledge Revolution. We had the first fully animated physics lab on the computer. You could take ropes, pulleys, balls and anything else you'd use in your physics textbook and the program would allow you to build anything you can think of in a physics lab.

Lester Germer was my first supervisor at Bell Labs. He was the Germer of the Davisson and Germer Experiment that is sometimes referred to in introductory texts on physics.

Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry.