Quotes About Physics

This means that subatomic particles are just like musical notes. The universe is a symphony of strings, physics represents the harmonies of these notes, and the "mind of God" that Einstein chased after for so many decades is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.

Since photographs of galaxies only show the beautiful swirling mass of stars, whatever is holding the mass together must not interact with light—it must be invisible.

Also, antimatter is the most expensive form of matter in the world. At today's prices, a gram would go for about $70 trillion.

So this is one goal of modern physics: to create a quantum theory of gravity where the quantum corrections are finite and calculable. In other words, Einstein's theory of gravity allows for the formation of wormholes, which may one day give us shortcuts through the galaxy. But Einstein's theory cannot tell us if these wormholes are stable or not. To calculate these quantum corrections, we need a theory that combines relativity with the quantum theory.

We all obey laws that exist within our personal reality. Asleep, we're still dreaming but the laws are different. If laws exist at all, the law of gravity may not exist in our sleeping dreams, the laws of physics are ignored and basic logic becomes irrelevant. Our waking dream follows physical laws and social and civic laws.

Qualsiasi studente nell'ora di fisica può provare con esperimenti l'esattezza di un'ipotesi scientifica. L'uomo, invece, vivendo una sola vita, non ha alcuna possibilità di verificare un'ipotesi mediante un esperimento, e perciò non saprà mai se avrebbe dovuto o no dare ascolto al proprio sentimento.

Asking economists for investment advice is like asking a physicist to fix a broken toilet. Not their field, though sort of related.

Accelerometrics is a cool new discipline. Newton and Galileo would love it.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

With Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, and God being seen as the powerful machine operator who perfectly controls the machine through these orderly laws, we end up with the opposite problem, the very opposite of the ancient situation. Now, instead of chaos reigning and us wondering if there's any order, order reigns supreme, and we wonder if there's any freedom.

What's the difference between physics and psychiatry? One's full of quarks, and the other's full of quacks.

The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing too.

Even if we choose to use the nonstandard notion of distance and thereby describe the radius as being shorter than the Planck length, the physics we encounter—as discussed in previous sections—will be identical to that of a universe in which the radius, in the conventional sense of distance, is larger than the Planck length

A tree is to the entire universe as a string is to an atom.

Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it's as if they're a single entity.

And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.

The beauty of physics, its raison d'etre, is that it offers insight into why things in the universe behave the way they do. The ability to predict behavior is a big part of the power of physics, but the heart of physics would be lost if it didn't give us a deep understanding of the hidden reality underlying what we observe.

Extraordinary emblems of math's ability to illuminate the dark corners of the cosmos, black holes have become the cynosures of modern physics.

According to string theory, if we could examine these particles with even greater precision—a precision many orders of magnitude beyond our present technological capacity—we would find that each is not pointlike, but instead consists of a tiny one-dimensional loop. Like an infinitely thin rubber band, each particle contains a vibrating, oscillating, dancing filament that physicists, lacking Gell-Mann's literary flair, have named a string.

General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects "want" to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It's as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information.

Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose—stars, planets, people, etc.—amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority of the universe, at least as measured by mass.

Black holes don't just tell us about how black holes store information. Black holes inform us about information storage in any context.