Quotes About Physics

The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

The only thing that makes sense is if the universe is beautiful and simple and elegant.

I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.

When I finished my degree I became a physics and maths teacher. And worked in the international school in Brussels, because like many kids, after University I went home going 'ahhh I don't know what to do'. I happened to fall upon a job there because they were desperate for a physics teacher which is a common theme among many schools.

Maybe I'd already guessed that the physics of us didn't defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

The final conclusion of all this is rather alarming. For it suggests that we must seek a non-computable physical theory that reaches beyond every computable level of oracle machines (and perhaps beyond).

There are completely deterministic universe models, with clear-cut rules of evolution, that are impossible to simulate computationally.

As Einstein said years later, talking to Sir Herbert Samuel in the grounds of Government House, Jerusalem: "If Michelson-Morley is wrong, then relativity is wrong.

Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystische).

He ran until he didn't know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there...

matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.

Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract.

The introduction to the 1 vs. 100 episode pointed out that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Langan's IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein's. But that doesn't mean Langan is 30 percent smarter than Einstein. That's ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics

It's impossible to walk through solid rock... You have to walk between the molecules that make up the rock.

I'm the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys' school in Sydney.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of disorder in a system.

In the sciences, the saga of Einstein's physics doctorate is revealing about institutional training and creativity. In the summer of 1900, Einstein graduated from the Swiss Polytechnic, but was not offered an assistant's post in the physics department

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics.

We can't travel beyond the edge of the universe without exceeding the speed of light, which is theoretically impossible. That's what you would expect in a simulation. You would have some sort of rule of physics to keep the simulated people from traveling beyond the edges. Here I'm assuming the universe is expanding at the same rate as the light that is traveling in all directions, so we can never catch up to it.

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.