Quotes About Physics

It appears that the universe may not only be filled with dark matter, but with dark energy.

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).

WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.

Because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There's no getting around physics.

The Golden Proportion, sometimes called the Divine Proportion, has come down to us from the beginning of creation. The harmony of this ancient proportion, built into the very structure of creation, can be unlocked with the 'key' ... 528, opening to us its marvelous beauty. Plato called it the most binding of all mathematical relations, and the key to the physics of the cosmos.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

The day I went into physics class is was death.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers...I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all of the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

Some physicists postulate that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and that we simply experience whatever present slice of the universe we happen to be in at the moment.

You cant publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism.

Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?

Quantum field theory must deal with [force] fields and [matter] fields on a fully equivalent footing...Here was my challenge.

Evelyn continued to hold the wheel, recognizing the sensation of being in control of the rudder, while Martin explained how the direction of the wind was key, and how all the elements worked together to affect speed. "It's physics," she said, becoming fascinated by the complexity of the air and water flow working together, and comprehending how the shape of the hull and sails and the size of the keel all played an important part in the boat's movement.

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).

nada puede curarnos mejor del antropocentrismo autor de todos nuestros males que asomarse a la física de lo infinitamente grande (o pequeño).

No son razones, son mostraciones perfectamente objetivas. Vos tendés a moverte en el continuo, como dicen los físicos, mientras que yo soy sumamente sensible a la discontinuidad vertiginosa de la existencia.

The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.

This way of thinking suggests that nothing is perfection - or at least, perfect symmetry, which to many physicists is the same thing. Nothing is perfect, but not very interesting.

To be sure, physicists have faith in string theory because, in some important sense, at least, it seems to work - just as people fly in airplanes because they work. The difference is, somebody understands how jets work. And no one, as yet, understands what underlies string theory.

All these dualities suggest that string theorists have been looking at the same animal, only some have discovered the tail, while others have found the ears or glimpsed a snout. The problem is, they still don't know what kind of animal they're dealing with.