Quotes About Physics

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," 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.

This is gravity—a product of the bending of spacetime.

In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths11 of a second.

Viennese physicist Ernst Mach, for whom is named the speed of sound

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

In simplest terms, what the equation says is that mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

hadrons"—a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula

which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction)

When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer's day, it's really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.

the idea of action at a distance—that one particle could instantaneously influence another trillions of miles away—was a stark violation of the special theory of relativity. This expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light and yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could. (No one, incidentally, has ever explained how the particles achieve this feat.

what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

To explain what kept atoms together, other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.

The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: "Bohr once commented that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said." Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: "Don't try.

the Bogdanov theory excited debate among physicists as to whether it was twaddle, a work of genius, or a hoax. 'Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, Columbia University physicist Peter Woit told the New York Times, 'but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.