Best Relativity Quotes

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

We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

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.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

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

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

That’s the feeling [of relativity] I always had about [Judy Blume] books which I re-read and re-read and re-read.

In this business, if you don`t have the capacity to step back and have some sort of relativity about things, you’re screwed.

Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the theory of relativity is, but I think what we all really want to know anyways, is whether we’re loved or not.

It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.

There are periods in life when you get caught up in the whole field of relativity and lose your moorings with the absolute.

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.

In 1905 Albert discovered Relativity, in 1906 he invented Rock and Roll.

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

When I was doing Professor Albert Einstein’s bust he had many a jibe at the Nazi professors, one hundred of whom had condemned his theory of relativity in a book. ‘Were I wrong,’ he said, ‘one professor would have been enough.

To show the relativity of what’s good taste and what’s not is something I like to play with.

The 4D style, or cosmic comics and relativistic humor, is based on Einstein’s theory of relativity which I came up with 20 years ago. 4D works use the idea of the fourth dimension, time, playing on such surrealistic and amazing subjects as motion relativity, space curvature and time dilation.

It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.

I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.

No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today’s sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us – to put it in extreme terms – to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

The rigid electron is in my view a monster in relation to Maxwell’s equations, whose innermost harmony is the principle of relativity… the rigid electron is no working hypothesis, but a working hindrance. Approaching Maxwell’s equations with the concept of the rigid electron seems to me the same thing as going to a concert with your ears stopped up with cotton wool. We must admire the courage and the power of the school of the rigid electron which leaps across the widest mathematical hurdles with fabulous hypotheses, with the hope to land safely over there on experimental-physical ground.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.

No, I don’t understand my husband’s theory of relativity, but I know my husband and I know he can be trusted.

In the ‘in-itself’ there is nothing of ‘causal connections’, of ‘necessity’, or of ‘psychological non-freedom’; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or ‘law’. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself’, we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically.

Let me tell you about Australia. It’s really, really, really, far from wherever you live on Earth. You fly and you fly and you fly. Then relativity takes over and you get younger and younger. And when you land, you’re a gleam in your father’s eye.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians