Quotes About Physics

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.

The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystic's consciousness—both physical and spiritual—in deep meditation.

The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where—as modern physics tells us—even empty space is curved.

The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.

the smile spread over her face like a time-lapse video he had once seen in a high school physics class of a rose in bloom.

She scanned the crowd and when she spotted Sam, the smile spread over her face like a time-lapse video he had once seen in a high school physics class of a rose in bloom.

When you speak to someone, your vocal cords start a compression wave in the air that spreads out from your mouth until those compressions and rarefactions reach the listener's ear. There, they vibrate the hair-like structures in the ear, producing the sensation of hearing. But the link between you and the listener is the longitudinal waves that pass through the air.

The remarkable Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell worked out in the early 1860s that light was an interaction between electricity and magnetism. And this meant that in principle, you could have an electric wave creating a magnetic wave, creating an electric wave and so on, hauling itself through empty space by its own bootstraps without any material medium required – it is the electromagnetic field that acts as the material.

Immensely simplified, quantum physics has two rules: Very small things don't have locations, we just have probabilities of where they are. The first rule only works if these very small things don't interact with their environment.

La teoría de cuerdas tiene un inconfundible regusto a la Grecia antigua, pues en lugar de ser deducida de las observaciones del universo que nos rodea, es una posibilidad surgida de la pura matemática y luego ajustada al mundo

On the energy radiated by the Sun) It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.

One of the beautiful things about mathematical physics is that equations contain stories.

Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac.

Imagine that light is shining out from a flashlight. According to common sense, if we run fast enough we could in principle catch up with the front of the beam of light as it advances forward. Common sense might even suggest that we could jog alongside the front of the beam if we managed to run at the speed of light. But if we are to follow Maxwell's equations to the letter, then no matter how fast we run, the beam still recedes away from us at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second.

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

But, as Einstein once said, "For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."5

Gravity is matter's sugar daddy.

For string theory to make sense, the universe should have nine spacial dimensions and one time dimension, for a total of ten dimensions.

If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if there is just the right amount of matter, space will have zero curvature.*