Quotes About Physics

Neutrino masses aren't completely understood as yet, so let's pretend that they don't interact with the Higgs, although the jury is still out.)

There's nothing wrong with doing elaborate double-blind studies to look for parapsychological or astrological effects, but the fact that such effects are incompatible with the known laws of physics means that you would be testing hypotheses that are so extremely unlikely as to render it hardly worth the effort.

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. "Do you know how fast you were going?" asks the cop. "No," Heisenberg replies. "But I know exactly where I am." I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are.

When you travel more slowly than the speed of light, you are moving mostly through time; if you were to travel faster than light (which you aren't about to do), you would be moving mostly through space.

a straight line through spacetime, if you like—is the path of longest time between two events.

Extraneous motion decreases the time elapsed between two events in spacetime, whereas it increases the distance traveled between two points in space.

The right answer, whatever it may turn out to be, will more likely be phrased in terms of wave functions, Schrödinger's equation, and Hilbert spaces.

argued for new ways of thinking about length and duration.

They then build detectors that patiently wait for the faint signal of a dark-matter particle passing through and perturbing a nucleus.

The issue that troubles us, when we get right down to it, isn't anything about the laws of physics; it's about free will.

Einstein attributed many of his physics breakthroughs to his violin breaks, which he believed helped him connect ideas in very different ways.

Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment.

The glacierscape called it up, the silent, shining tulle, the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems and corollaries, that girl who had thought a wedding promise was binding as a law of physics.

Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.

True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.

I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.

Reality is a wave function traveling both backward and forward in time.

For us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.

Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.

If time were perfectly symmetric, gravity wouldn't exist.

It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.

I live in the present due to the constraints of the time-space continuum.

Time and suffering are inseperable. In life, as in physics, both are the common denominator of all experiences.

What's the Density of the Universe?