Quotes About Physics

El mundo entero está compuesto únicamente de dos cosas: energía y materia. En la física elemental aprendemos que ni la materia ni la energía (las únicas realidades conocidas por el ser humano) pueden crearse ni destruirse. Sólo pueden trasformarse, pero no destruirse. La vida, si es algo, es energía. Si la materia y la energía no pueden destruirse, entonces la vida tampoco.

Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical "evidence" (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

black holes generate an amazing amount of light. The problem is, their gravity is so great, the light can't escape—it just gets pulled in along with everything else.

In string theory, zero has been banished from the universe; there is no such thing as zero distance or zero time. This solves all the infinity problems of quantum mechanics.

if history is any guide, a long, long road lies ahead before physicists will be able to tame fusion reactions

GAS VERSUS PLASMA: In a gas (left), every electron is stuck to an atom. In a plasma (right), the electrons roam free, attracted by nuclei, but not attached to any single nucleus.

Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound.

some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3

And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry. And

As former Fed governor Kevin Warsh has said, "Economics, and the conduct of monetary policy, after all, is not physics.

The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

The fact that atomic energy is used in warfare does not make international conflicts problems in physics; likewise, the fact that the brain is used in human behavior does not make moral and personal conflicts problems in medicine.

La culpa no es de las leyes de la física, sino del sencillo hecho de que, a veces, lo que los modelos dejan fuera es más importante que lo que incluyen.

In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect - a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities - miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction.

How many black holes have we been up close and personal with? Kosta countered. All sorts of odd things happen near the event horizon, from huge tidal forces to variations in time. Personally, I'm voting on it having to do with gravity, either a polarization of the fields themselves or else something related to the time differential. I didn't know physics had become a democracy, Hanan murmered.

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy

The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

The stone did not respond or at least I don't think it did, but I imagined it answering quietly, telling me that my left hand and my right hand are made up of atoms from different stars and I looked this up in a library book later and discovered that theoretical physics did indeed affirm the awesomeness.

An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.