Quotes About Physics

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws.…" And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time.

Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail.

Like charges, charges of the same sign, strongly repel one another. We can think of it as a dedicated mutual aversion to their own kind, a little as if the world were densely populated by anchorites and misanthropes.

el deterioro de sus cuerpos de que habla la segunda ley de la termodinámica

At depth on Jupiter and Saturn, the pressures are so great that atoms sweat electrons, and the air becomes a metal.

The fact that atoms are composed of three kinds of elementary particles—protons, neutrons and electrons—is a comparatively recent finding. The neutron was not discovered until 1932. Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns make, essentially, everything.

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.

Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and that has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below.

I began peering into the corners of the room, making sure all the shadows were cast by objects and obeying known laws of physics.

You believe in God? Dude. Only God could have created physics.

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious." —ALBERT EINSTEIN

INERTIA: Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed - indefinitely!

I made a quick calculation: a 180-pound man, falling thirty feet under an acceleration of 32.2 feet per second square—I drew the shade and turned away from the window and closed my eyes.

The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities...and that they interact by quantum physics.

Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.

Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.

Homo economicus may be the smallest unit of analysis in economic theory—equivalent to the atom in Newton's physics—but, just like an atom, his composition has profound consequences.

There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.