Quotes About Physics

Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously : it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are that catalyst.

there could be more than three dimensions of space but they had to be small and unchanging if they were to avoid altering the character of the world that we experience.

If the fine structure constant, that governs the strength of electromagnetic forces, were changed by more than 4 per cent or the strong force by more than 0.4 of one per cent then the production of carbon or oxygen would be reduced by factors of between 30 and 1000.

Everything that is made of atoms has a density quite close to the density of a single atom given by the mass of an atom divided by its volume.

One of the curious problems of physics is that it has two beautifully effective theories – quantum mechanics and general relativity – but they govern different realms of Nature.

Moreover it is assumed that wormholes only join universes to baby universes, or universes to themselves; there are no wormholes joining different baby universes in this approximation, nor are there allowed to be wormholes which split up into two or more other wormholes.

Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.

Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions are fundamentally mathematical laws,- laws of reason. Hence force, activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean Intelligence

Every time he spoke, in fact, he had the appearance of thinly addressing an audience, raising and lowering his head as though from notes, and speaking in a penetrating singsong towards a point over his listeners' heads. You would have diagnosed a Physics B.Sc. with Socialist platform tendencies, and you would have been right.

You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

Our lives are restrained by two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and natural selection.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.

That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.

Virtually no major scientist today claims that the fine tuning was purely a result of chance factors at work in a single universe.

Give me a lever and I will move the earth

I have applied to go to either Durham or Loughborough University to study Applied Physics and would like to get some qualification behind me. But when I do think about becoming professional Essex would be my first choice as I have been very happy playing and practising with them.

I cannot quantify the physics of friendships and do not know exactly how much intense pressure can be applied before these glittery, brittle bonds break.

If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.

Liquid helium belongs to a class of fluids known as quantum fluids, as distinct from classical fluids.

In fact any experiment that measures a quantum effect is one in which the quantum effect is aligned with the behavior of some heavy, macroscopic object; that's how we measure it.

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.