Top 1106 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Physicists - Page 3

My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family.

The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave, and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.

I am happy that I have so many friends all over the world who contributed to my research work, and I believe that also in the future, basic research offers the best opportunity of reaching across borders and overcoming ideological barriers.

Like cats' eyes gleaming in the gloom, the precious diamonds rest.

I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.

Greenpeace protesters who lived on the trees right above the planned radar location (Google Maps) and who eat environmentally friendly roots, insect, excrements, and dirt.

What is needed is competence first and enthusiasm first. There is nothing second! Although each or one of these alone is a good start, one without the other is impotent. But if I had a choice I would have enthusiasm first.

In short, the greatest contribution to real security that science can make is through the extension of the scientific method to the social sciences and a solution of the problem of complete avoidance of war.

Each community has a curious and distorted image of itself which is always flattering.

It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life.

There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope - the appearance of a Nova.

Your connections to all the things around you literally define who you are.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think.

Every astronaut flew into space for a living. But while NASA has not solved the security problems, I would not put me back into a shuttle - and no other astronaut. The confidence is shaken.

Physics is simple, but subtle.

Neither physical science nor psychology can ever 'explain' human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.

Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplomacy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things--amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.

No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.

Neutrino physics is largely an art of learning a great deal by observing nothing.

The Earth is warming but physical evidence from around the world tells us that human-emitted carbon dioxide has played only a minor role in it. Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) that goes back at least one million years.

The best way to learn is to teach

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.

What do we mean by soft matter? Americans prefer to call it 'complex fluids.' This is a rather ugly name, which tends to discourage the young students.

Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.

But certainly the laser proved to be what I realized it was going to be. At that moment in my life I was too ignorant in business law to be able to do it right, and if I did it over again probably the same damn thing would happen.

The discovery that light elements could be disintegrated by artificially accelerated particles gave an additional impetus to development work on the various methods of producing them.

When X-rays traverse matter of any kind, this matter becomes a source of a radiation similar in character to that of the primary radiation falling upon it.

I liked quantum mechanics very much. The subject was hard to understand but easy to apply to a large number of interesting problems.

About fifty million years ago...geological evidence indicates CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

He who can listen to the music in the midst of noise can achieve great things.

The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not. It's clear from the Opinion Polls and my own experience, that indeed most people accept the notion that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. The greater the education, the MORE likely to accept this proposition

We would never get away from it. ... It's bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption?

In recent times, modern science has developed to give mankind, for the first time in the history of the human race, a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply consist in taking away from someone else.

The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.

Rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory.

Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y , for some value of Y not equal to X.

Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.

I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

We have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today.

I read a book called 'The Tao of Physics' by Fritjof Capra that pointed out the parallels between quantum physics and eastern mysticism. I started to feel there was more to reality than conventional science allowed for and some interesting ideas that it hadn't got round to investigating, such as altered states of consciousness.

When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it's very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.

Although each of us obviously inhabits a separate physical body, the laboratory data from a hundred years of parapsychology research strongly indicate that there is no separation in consciousness.

To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair.

The next grand extensions of mathematical physics will, in all likelihood, be furnished by quaternions.

God walked down the stairs of heaven with a Baby in His arms.

Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

Winning the prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work itself.

We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.

Fusion will be ready when society needs it.

It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that has happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realised in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.

Your brain never stops developing and changing. It's been doing it from the time your were an embryo, and will keep on doing it all your life. And this ability, perhaps, represents it greatest strength.

[The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world.

We have here a proof that there is in the atom a fundamental quantity, which increases by regular steps as one passes from one element to the next. This quantity can only be the charge on the central positive nucleus, of the existence of which we already have definite proof.

Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859. It is perhaps the most influential book that has ever been published, because it was read by scientist and non- scientist alike, and it aroused violent controversy. Religious people disliked it because it appeared to dispense with God; scientists liked it because it seemed to solve the most important problem in the universe-the existence of living matter. In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it.

It is as if the formation of patterns within the unconscious mind is accompanied by physical patterns in the outer world. In particular, as psychic patterns are on the point of reaching consciousness, the synchronicities reach their peak; moreover, they generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment of forces within his or her own personality...It is as if the internal restructuring produces external resonance, or as if a burst of 'mental energy' is propagated outward onto the world.

In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. … Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.