Quotes About Physics

I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.

My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.

As a physics major at Yale in the 1970s, I developed crushes on nearly all my male professors.

I went to Yale and I was a physics and philosophy undergrad, graduated in 2005.

The height of the pulleys from the ground was twelve yards, and consequently, when the weights had descended through that distance, they had to be wound up again in order to renew the motion of the paddle.

Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, we have long had a tradition of close cooperation between physicists and technicians.

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.

Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.

Radiative transfer calculations I can do standing on my head.

Symmetry does mean something different for physicists than for members of the public. It means that an object or a theory does not change when you make some transformation - either rotating or moving it or doing something to the equations.

What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.

An object is chiral if it cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation.

Einstein's 'spooky interactions.'" Einstein had famously described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

From a certain temperature on, the molecules 'condense' without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true.

As revealed by physics, the truth is so remarkable, so amazing!

The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn't flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems—of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it.

field is two million times greater than the strength

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.

Isn't the universe full of gaseous elements?" Andrew says, "Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.