Top 235 Physicist Quotes & Sayings

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.

To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

Self-confidence is an important ingredient that makes for a successful physicist.

When I was growing up, I wanted passionately to be a physicist.

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

The determination of the relationship and mutual dependence of the facts in particular cases must be the first goal of the Physicist; and for this purpose he requires that an exact measurement may be taken in an equally invariable manner anywhere in the world... Also, the history of electricity yields a well-known truth-that the physicist shirking measurement only plays, different from children only in the nature of his game and the construction of his toys.

I'd no more listen to a physicist's advice on my fertility than I would let a mechanic cut my hair.

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

I was a child of a tech family. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist and was always a gadget guy.

The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.

...The entire preoccupation of the physicist is with things that contain within themselves a principle of movement and rest.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

I always looked at myself as a physicist learning new tricks by looking at nature.

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.

My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.

Neumann, to a physicist seeking help with a difficult problem: Simple. This can be solved by using the method of characteristics. Physicist: I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics. Neumann: In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.

When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.

Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

I've never heard a person say, 'I had a rotten mother, but she's such a great physicist.

Said to physicist John Bahcall. I don't believe in natural science.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist. These are scientists who are making the future in their laboratories.

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves.

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.

There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver.

Maxwell is the physicist's physicist.

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.

As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.

Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

I was brought up as a physicist.

When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.

I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.

The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

So is not mathematical analysis then not just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which after all we could have done without; and, it is not even to be feared that this artificial language be a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality.

A mathematician is an? individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

You're no longer the engineer or the physicist or the writer - you're the whistleblower.

To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.