Quotes About Physics

I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

quantum physics, in which the simple act of observation seemed to affect the physical world, and in which changes performed on one physical system could have an immediate effect on another quite unlinked system (the theory of nonlocality)

The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine.

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

A rainbow is the product of physics working for your appreciation of beauty.

Physics is perceived as a lonesome, nerdy kind of enterprise that has very little to do with human feelings and the things that excite people day-to-day about each other. Yet physicists in their own working environment are very social creatures.

I'm an engineer. I studied physics and engineering. In fact, in 1978 I started working as an aerospace engineer with General Dynamics. I used to test cruise missiles, space systems, I worked on the first generation of cruise missile.

Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

Symmetries are the playing field on which the physical world works and which determine the rules of the game. The symmetries of nature determine for us things that remain constant, that can't be changed. Those are the guideposts in physics, the quantities like energy and momentum.

If you understand physics of how a locomotive works, that knowledge is irreplaceable.

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can't be done. That's very likely the right answer. However, we don't know for sure.

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.

As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.

Quantum physics is quite interesting. All these tiny particles are there as much as they're not there. That to me is very, very interesting. And how our thoughts change the outcome of an experiment, I think that's all quite spiritual.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

You think Earth's gravity is really something when you're climbing the stairs. But, as far as physics goes, it is a pipsqueak, infinitesimal, tiny little effect.

I have a problem with telling jokes about physics. Quite often the audience have no idea what you are talking about and, to be honest, I don't know what I'm talking about either.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

The most important single thing about string theory is that it's a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That's big news.