Top 1200 Particle Physics Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

I have always enjoyed explaining physics. In fact it's more than just enjoyment: I need to explain physics.

One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

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

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn't have that, and he said 'okay, call it the God particle', and the editor accepted it. I don't think he should've have done, because it's so misleading.

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.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.

That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.

When I entered medical physics in 1958 there were fewer than 100 in the U.S. and I could see many opportunities to apply my knowledge of nuclear physics.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

I had imagined doing nuclear physics and cosmic ray work in greater style in peace time. To do modern physics in a small way is of no use of all.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.

Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of political economy, but that society is now a reflex of key shifts in music theory and practice.... [Sampladelia is] the sound made by those early-twentieth-century discoveries in particle physics and relativiity theory, the projection of the minds of Einstein, Heisenbery, and Bohr, their fateful explorations of liquid time, curving space, uncertainty fields and relativity theorems, into densely configured and fully ambivalent android music tracks

I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.

Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.

If I want to understand the laws of physics I have to first believe what I read about physics. I have to have faith in what I read.

Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.

I've talked to ghosts once. For me, it makes sense for them to be real because of physics. In physics, you can't destroy energy; it can only be conserved.

Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

The application of group theory to physics became one of the main branches of physics that I specialized in.

Motion is always a relative thing. I move in relation to something else. Any particle in this universe can change in relation to any other particle; but take the whole universe as one, and in relation to what can it move? There is nothing besides it. So this infinite Unit is unchangeable, immovable, absolute, and this is the Real Man.

Physics is a hobby of mine, as much as a person of limited intelligence can understand physics.

Now I know that patience and time can do more than even strength and passion. The years of frustration are ready to be harvested. All that I have managed to accomplish, and all that I hope to accomplish, has been and will be by that plodding, patient, persevering process which builds the ant heap, particle by particle, thought by thought, step by step.

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

The thing about physicists is that they tend to think that everything is physics. I don't. That's not what music is to me. You can explain aspects of it in physical terms, including the physics of anatomy: how our bodies move, the torsional moment of inertia, the way you move your body to a beat, the inherent periodicities of the heartbeat, the gait. That's physics, too, I guess - maybe they'd call it biophysics.

When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.

It's as if we think the laws of physics are subject to debate and amendment and political contributions can sway the laws of physics.

There is no logical staircase running from the physics of 10-28 cm. to the physics of 1028 light-years.

Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.

I loved teaching. In addition to that, I love physics. And so what could be better than to talk physics to bright young students?

Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then natural philosophy became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time theres a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

Medical physics is an applied area of physics.

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science

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.

There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics.

Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.

The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain.

I founded an educational software company called Knowledge Revolution. We had the first fully animated physics lab on the computer. You could take ropes, pulleys, balls and anything else you'd use in your physics textbook and the program would allow you to build anything you can think of in a physics lab.

Everyone and everything that shows up in the world of form in this universe originates not from a particle, as quantum physics teaches us, but from an energy field. That energy field can be called God, soul, spirit, or consciousness. It looks a certain way, sounds a certain way, and feels a certain way. I try to stay in harmony with what I believe it sounds and feels like.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

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

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.

Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical ? and maybe even experimental ? grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.

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.

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less that God wishes - that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens - that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their course. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebush is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence - the fall of...leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

Quantum physics is the physics of possibilities. And not just material possibilities, but also possibilities of meaning, of feeling, and of intuiting. You choose everything you experience from these possibilities, so quantum physics is a way of understanding your life as one long series of choices that are in themselves the ultimate acts of creativity.

My father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.

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

Whenever you say you're a physicist, there's a certain fraction of people who immediately go, 'Oh, I hated physics in high school.' That's because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.

The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.