Theoretical Physics Quotes

1. "Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the last few years, they believed that the entire universe, the one universe, was generated from a few principles of symmetry and mathematical truths, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood. However, two theories in physics, called "eternal inflation" and "string theory," now"
Author: Alan Lightman

2. "From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind."
Author: David Gross

3. "The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial."
Author: Dick

4. "Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal."
Author: Ian McEwan

5. "I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy."
Author: Max Born

6. "I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics."
Author: Max Born

7. "The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers."
Author: Paul Dirac

8. "When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries."
Author: Philipp Von Jolly

9. "It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists."
Author: Robert B. Laughlin

10. "In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels."
Author: Scarlett Thomas

11. "We are out of munitions, We will have to depend on theoretical physics. (Spoken in the heat of battle by Sammuil Petrovitch in Theories of Flight"
Author: Simon Morden

12. "The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them"
Author: Stephen Hawking

13. "The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics."
Author: Wolfgang Pauli

Theoretical Physics Quotes Pictures