Physics Quotes

1. "Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me."
Author: Alan Lightman

2. "No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
Author: Albert Einstein

3. "?your first thought would send the power of Quantum physics into a hive of activity. your first thought, would inevitably become the destiny of the day"
Author: Andre Jordan

4. "What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers' barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?"
Author: Annie Dillard

5. "[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

6. "Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll."
Author: Daniel H. Pink

7. "Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning."
Author: Douglas Adams

8. "The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules"
Author: Douglas Adams

9. "The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

10. "This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)"
Author: Eugene Taylor

11. "Metaphysics, in my understanding, is the unity of knowledge and the meaning and orientation this unity gives to life. If this unity is the unity of knowledge, how can it be all that subjective? It is a faith grounded in knowledge."
Author: Fazlur Rahman

12. "In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you."
Author: Frank Wilczek

13. "Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it."
Author: Frederick Soddy

14. "One may characterize physics as the doctrine of the repeatable, be it a succession in time or the co-existence in space. The validity of physical theorems is founded on this repeatability."
Author: Friedrich Hund

15. "I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on."
Author: Geoffrey West

16. "Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us."
Author: Huston Smith

17. "The new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information."
Author: James Gleick

18. "The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence."
Author: James Joseph Sylvester

19. "Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him"
Author: Jeremy Aldana

20. "I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time."
Author: Jerome Isaac Friedman

21. "Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry."
Author: Johannes P. Muller

22. "I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than either the person I was or whatever I am now."
Author: John Green

23. "I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he'd just hurt. I don't understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot."
Author: Karen Russell

24. "After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire."
Author: Karen Thompson Walker

25. "You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes."
Author: Kevin Powers

26. "Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer.Memories r not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. they can be lost forever. It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting,I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again."
Author: Lady Gaga

27. "Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool."
Author: Laura Kalpakian

28. "To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole."
Author: Lene Hau

29. "Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness."
Author: Leonard Mlodinow

30. "I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics."
Author: Leonard Susskind

31. "Ronan didn't need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

32. "Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere."
Author: Marguerite Yourcenar

33. "The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion."
Author: Michael Behe

34. "But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography."
Author: Michael Polanyi

35. "Think how hard physics would be if particles could think"
Author: Murray Gell Mann

36. "Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that the modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views."
Author: Norbert Wiener

37. "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."
Author: Paul Davies

38. "He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?"
Author: Primo Levi

39. "A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory."
Author: Richard Dawkins

40. "I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again."
Author: Ripley Patton

41. "Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant."
Author: Rupert Sheldrake

42. "I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles."
Author: Stephan Pastis

43. "When you begin to actively participate in the creation of your life, there is never an end, even in death, for physics tells us that nothing is ever created nor destroyed, merely transformed."
Author: Stephen Richards

44. "The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology."
Author: Susanne K. Langer

45. "Svante Arrhenius, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics."
Author: Svante Arrhenius

46. "Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly."
Author: Swami Sivananda

47. "The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female."
Author: Teresa Palmer

48. "Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third."
Author: Thomas Huxley

49. "Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is."
Author: Voltaire

50. "When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded."
Author: Walter Isaacson

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