Quotes About Physics

It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

I read a lot of astronomy magazines, and go to a lot of astronomy sites, and physics sites. I love reading about quantum computation and quantum physics. I don't understand it all, but I love reading it over and over again so that I think I have some idea of what they're talking about.

The magnetic cleavage of the spectral lines is dependent on the size of the charge of the electron, or, more accurately, on the ratio between the mass and the charge of the electron.

As the size of cyclotrons increases and faster particles are produced, a difficulty arises due to the relativistic increase of mass of the particle.

I love superconductors.

I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.

energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become.

in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

quarks," a collective term that encompasses all particles that are governed by the strong nuclear force.

In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium.

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine

A child half your height who falls and strikes her head will experience only 1/32 of the force of impact that a grown person would feel, which is part of the reason that children so often seem to be mercifully indestructible.15

an atom with an abnormal number of neutrons.)

Called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said.

The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms.

The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.