Quotes About Relativity

An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time

Distance either of time or place is sufficient to reconcile weak minds to wonderful relations.

Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

All suffering is relative to experience, and life while it is everything is also not much at all.

In everything continuous and divisible, it is possible to grasp the more, the less, and the equal, and these either in reference to the thing itself, or in relation to us.

Minkowski spacetime.

Einsteinian time dilation.

Des petites filles, attachées au gaullisme comme à l'équivalent français de l'hitlérisme, ajoutaient : la vérité est relative, même en géométrie

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

She will not notice that her clocks have slowed down, because she will herself be thinking more slowly.

Matter tells Spacetime how to curve, and Spacetime tells matter how to move.

Matter tells space-time how to curve. Space-time tells matter how to move.

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.

TRUTH, such as it appears to us, can only be relative, because we ourselves, being relative creatures, have only a relative perception and judgment. We appreciate that which is true to ourselves, not that which is universally true. And truth may well assume an aspect to one different from that it assumes to another.

What then is Error? It is nothing per se. It is the opposition of one relative truth against another to the exclusion of the latter.

I reckon I would be able compare anything to anything else if you gave me enough time.

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully. It's like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, "correct" viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.

Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the relativity of values and of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation.