Browsing Topic Best Physicist Quotes

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

… chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.

Whenever I want to represent or depict the official version, I will refer to them as ‘mathematicians’ or ‘mathematical physicists’ or idiots or something like that. There are no physicists in mainstream ‘Physics.’ From Newton to Einstein to Hawking, they are all just mathematicians as far as Science and Physics are concerned.

A mathematician is an? individual who calls himself a ‘physicist’ and does ‘physics’ and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

But, as Einstein once said, For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.5

Failure is success in progress

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Physicists, being in no way different from the rest of the population, have short memories for what is inconvenient.

The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, ‘Gee, I could have thought of that.’

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

I believe that numbers and functions of Analysis are not the arbitrary result of our minds; I think that they exist outside of us, with the same character of necessity as the things of objective reality, and we meet them or discover them, and study them, as do the physicists, the chemists and the zoologists.

I don’t think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A, that there is no consensus, and, B, that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.

Nature’s economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.

Intellectual men who quickly wolf down whatever nourishment is necessary for their bodies with a kind of disdain, may be very rational and have a noble intelligence, but they are not men of taste.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

No scientist or student of science, need ever read an original work of the past. As a general rule, he does not think of doing so. Rutherford was one of the greatest experimental physicists, but no nuclear scientist today would study his researches of fifty years ago. Their substance has all been infused into the common agreement, the textbooks, the contemporary papers, the living present.

I really want to go into the future 500 years and be a quantum physicist. Not only would I get to see all the incredible inventions I know will be out there, but I’d be able to understand the science behind them!

Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.

Perhaps the best argument…that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas…being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.

Over the last century, physicists have used light quanta electrons, alpha particles, X-rays, gamma-rays, protons, neutrons and exotic sub-nuclear particles for this purpose. Much important information about the target atoms or nuclei or their assemblage has been obtained in this way. In witness of this importance one can point to the unusual concentration of scattering enthusiasts among earlier Nobel Laureate physicists. One could say that physicists just love to perform or interpret scattering experiments.

Chemists are, on the whole, like physicists, only ‘less so’.They don’t make quite the same wonderful mistakes, and much what they do is an art, related to cooking, instead of a true science. They have their moments, and their sources of legitimate pride. They don’t split atoms, as the physicists do. They join them together, and a very praiseworthy activity that is.

What is the origin of the urge, the fascincation that drives physicists, mathematicians, and presumably other scientists as well? Psychoanalysis suggests that it is sexual curiosity. You start by asking where little babies come from, one thing leads to another, and you find yourself preparing nitroglycerine or solving differential equations. This explanation is somewhat irritating, and therefore probably basically correct.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, ‘Did you ask any great questions today?’ And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we’re excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don’t ask somebody who’s writing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

Bohm’s interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist. All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property ‘nonlocality.’

I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.

Today, we know that time travel need not be confined to myths, science fiction, Hollywood movies, or even speculation by theoretical physicists. Time travel is possible. For example, an object traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. This means that if you were to travel into outer space and return, moving close to light speed, you could travel thousands of years into the Earth’s future.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

Very strange people, physicists – in my experience the ones who aren’t dead are in some way very ill.

Some people skip through life. Others are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder if we are moving through time, or whether time is moving through us. Light, unlike anything else in the universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning.