Quotes About Physics

mollusks"—Einstein's word for entities in a relativistic world.

Ignored...was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity...they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system.

Chaitin proved that physical laws alone, for example, could not explain chemistry or biology, because the laws of physics contain drastically less information than do chemical or biological phenomena.

In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable. Another, less celebrated, was his key role in establishing a trustworthy gold standard, which made economic valuations as calculable and reliable as the physical dimensions of items in trade.

Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12

We are awed by the ultimate simplicity and power of the creativity of physical nature- and by its beauty on all scales.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

The demonstration starts by filling the two beakers almost to their brims with water and then placing them side-by-side, lips touching. An electrode immersed in each beaker imposes a potential difference on the order of 10 kV.

Yet knowing the physics steals none of the wonder as the sky turns from blue to crimson, then deep purple, and finally embraces the black of night as Earth's rotation

In laboratories, we can see the results of experiments but we can't follow the reactions that lead to those results. The paths of those reactions may reside outside the physical measurements of length, width, height, and time. Physics has entered the metaphysical, the realm beyond the physically perceivable, in the fullest sense of that word.

Gravity is always attractive.

E = MC^2: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

he wanted to prostrate at newton's alter and weep with gratitude for the blessing that made all things fall to the goddamn ground

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

I would say there are three important things about graphene. It's two-dimensional, which is the best possible number for studying fundamental physics. The second thing is the quality of graphene, which stems from its extremely strong carbon-carbon bonds. And finally, the system is also metallic.

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.

With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.

I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.

Someday, when the ultimate laws of physics are in our grasp, we may discover that the notion of time isn't actually essential. Time might instead emerge to play an important role in the macroscopic world of our experience, even if it is nowhere to be found in the final Theory of Everything.

Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.

As physics has proven, we're ultimately particulate matter, which means we are all one. That's why racial and gender bias is so ridiculous.

Either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content, or else theology must ultimately become a branch of physics.