Quotes About Physics

It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game

I went to engineering school, I went to physics class. I said, 'Screw this, I don't want to be here. I'd much rather be at a club playing music.

Whenever some aspect of nature doesn't care about direction, circles are bound to appear.

What I've just described is called a system of differential equations. Such equations arise whenever we have rules for speeds depending on current positions.

From a purely mathematical perspective, a power law signifies nothing in particular—it's just one of many possible kinds of algebraic relationship. But when a physicist sees a power law, his eyes light up. For power laws hint that a system may be organizing itself. They arise at phase transitions, when a system is poised at the brink, teetering between order and chaos. They arise in fractals, when an arbitrarily small piece of a complex shape is a microcosm of the whole.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Mindless, lifeless things can sync spontaneously. The sympathy of clocks taught us that the capacity for sync does not depend on intelligence, or life, or natural selection. It springs from the deepest source of all: the laws of mathematics and physics.

No matter how erratically something moves, the area accumulated under its speed curve up to time t always equals the total distance it has traveled up to that time.

The solution to Schrödinger's equation shows that a small portion of the electron probability wave exists on the far side of an impenetrable barrier.

All of calculus, and hence all of theoretical physics, hinges on this assumption of continuous space and time. That assumption of continuity has been resoundingly successful so far.

At such small scales, space and time might seethe and roil at random. They might fluctuate like bubbling foam.

In 1899, the father of quantum theory, a German physicist named Max Planck, realized that there was one and only one way to combine these fundamental constants to produce a scale of length.

Space and time would no longer make sense below these scales. They're the end of the line.

So he used calculus not only to predict the existence of electromagnetic waves but also to solve an age-old mystery: What was the nature of light? Light, he realized, was an electromagnetic wave.

Come on, Rory! It isn't rocket science, it's just quantum physics! -The Doctor (Matt Smith)

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.

This book intends to make the case for explanation by reduction to physics and mechanical engineering, to this alternative realm of explanation: not to alternative explanations but to explanations of phenomena with which the biologist's classical chemical reductionism just doesn't help. As we'll see, this realm not only explains different phenomena but provides information that makes wonderfully satisfying intuitive sense.

Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn't unacceptably misleading.

There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne.

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

Mathematics is the means by which we deduce the consequences of physical principles. More than that, it is the indispensable language in which the principles of physical science are expressed.

The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers and physicists is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect.

Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.

There is no principle, built into the laws of nature, that says that theoretical physicists have to be happy.