Quotes About Physics

It is easy to time-travel, the physicist says—we do it every day. Travelling backward is the problem.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.

There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.

As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks, she said coolly. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don't bend.

Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa.

I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.

Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.

Un choque de automóvil es un asunto violento, y pueden sucederle muchas cosas terribles a una masa de carne y hueso que se desplace a gran velocidad dentro de un objeto metálico y pesado que se para de repente.

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

LAW OF FALLING BODIES (1634)

BOYLE'S LAW (1662)

HOOKE'S LAW (1676)

LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION (1686)

THREE LAWS OF MOTION AND ORBITS OF COMETS (1687, 1705)

An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.

Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.

Why should the laws of nature have allowed exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and no less?

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

No matter how it looks to us, love never loses control; the laws of our relations are as honest and as exact as the laws of physics.

If it is love that makes the world go round, it is self-induction that makes electromagnetic waves go round the world.