Best Physicist Quotes

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Be a voice, not an echo.

Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. Look around at how people want to get more out of life than they put in. A man of value will give more than he receives. Be creative, but make sure that what you create is not a curse for mankind.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

Never memorize something that you can look up.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

The law of attraction is the law of creation. Quantum physicists tell us that the entire Universe emerged from thought!

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Said to physicist John Bahcall. I don’t believe in natural science.

When the time comes to change a paradigm–to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another–the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.

I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am-most of them theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper thinkers than I am, I have broader interests than they have.

You can pay attention to the fact, in which case you’ll probably become a mathematician, or you can ignore it, in which case you’ll probably become a physicist.

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson’s mass is what it is.

I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I’m a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators.

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists.

Our relationships as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a beautiful woman – we should accept with gratitude any favours she offers, but we should not expect too much nor believe all that is said.

We are fast approaching a situation in which nobody will believe anything we [physicists] say in any matter that touches upon our self-interest. Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or social value.

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.

For it is the same whether you take it that the Earth is in motion or the Sky. For, in both the cases, it does not affect the Astronomical Science. It is just for the Physicist to see if it is possible to refute it.

I am a particle physicist, which is the nearest branch to nuclear physics. So in that sense I was the sort of right connection with the subject of nuclear energy and so on.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.

Reality is what kicks back when you kick it. This is just what physicists do with their particle accelerators. We kick reality and feel it kick back. From the intensity and duration of thousands of those kicks over many years, we have formed a coherent theory of matter and forces, called the standard model, that currently agrees with all observations.

Self-confidence is an important ingredient that makes for a successful physicist.

I still can’t figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn’t even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.

Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere.

The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.