A Quote by Robert J. Sawyer

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.

Robert J. Sawyer

Quote Topics

Canada Greatest Institute Perimeter Physics Pure Theoretical Theoretical Physics Waterloo World

Quote Author

Robert J. Sawyer
Canadian - Writer
Born: April 29, 1960

But, contrary to the lady's prejudices about the engineering profession, the fact is that quite some time ago the tables were turned between theory and applications in the physical sciences. Since World War II the discoveries that have changed the world are not made so much in lofty halls of theoretical physics as in the less-noticed labs of engineering and experimental physics. The roles of pure and applied science have been reversed; they are no longer what they were in the golden age of physics, in the age of Einstein, Schrödinger, Fermi and Dirac.

Nicholas Metropolis

The first thing to realize about physics ... is its extraordinary indirectness.... For physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.... Theoretical physics runs merrily along with these unreal abstractions, but its conclusions are checked, at every possible point, by experiments.

Anthony Standen

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

Chris Eigeman

It seems that every practitioner of physics has had to wonder at some point why mathematics and physics have come to be so closely entwined. Opinions vary on the answer. ..Bertrand Russell acknowledged..'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little.' ..Mathematics may be indispensable to physics, but it obviously does not constitute physics.

Etienne Klein

Although I was really interested in physics, I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was really hard. I did theoretical physics.

Lenny Abrahamson

In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.

Burton Richter

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

It is impossible to discuss realism in logic without drawing in the empirical sciences... A truly realistic mathematics should be conceived, in line with physics, as a branch of the theoretical construction of the one real world and should adopt the same sober and cautious attitude toward hypothetic extensions of its foundation as is exhibited by physics.

Hermann Weyl

It is true that physics gives a wonderful training in precise, logical thinking-about physics. It really does depend upon accurate reproducible experiments, and upon framing hypotheses with the greatest possible freedom from dogmatic prejudice. And if these were the really important things in life, physics would be an essential study for everybody.

Anthony Standen

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

Richard P. Feynman

I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.

Vandana Shiva

Even if we ignore the 'non-theoretical' knowledge which we acquire through experience (such as the knowledge of what something tastes like) and concentrate on theoretical knowledge, there is no good reason to think that physics can literally give the theory of everything. Here I want to be really pedantic. Although everything may be subject to physical law, not everything can be explained or described in physical terms. Physics has literally nothing to say about society, morality and the mind, for example - but of course these are parts of 'everything'.

Tim Crane

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

In the late '30's when I was in college, physics - and in particular, nuclear physics - was the most exciting field in the world.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics.