Physics famous quotes
07-17-2025
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Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
-- A. N. Wilson -
Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.
-- Aaron Klug -
The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable.
-- Abby Sunderland -
Ive always really been into science, and in the last five years Ive gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.
-- Adam Pascal -
Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics - this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.
-- Alain Aspect -
Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.
-- Albert Einstein -
Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
-- Albert Einstein -
Politics is far more complicated than physics.
-- Albert Einstein -
The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.
-- Alton Brown -
Well, I'm leaning probably toward the sciences like physics.
-- Amy Carter -
There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.
-- Anthony James Leggett -
Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber.
-- Antony Garrett Lisi -
Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.
-- Antony Hewish -
Physics is a hobby of mine, as much as a person of limited intelligence can understand physics.
-- Arthur D. Levinson -
So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.
-- Arthur Eddington -
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
-- Arthur Eddington -
In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."
-- Arthur Eddington -
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.
-- Arthur Eddington -
In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.
-- Arthur Eddington -
There's no evidence whatsoever that Darwin had anything useful to say or anything to say period about how life began or how the universe began or how gravity began or how physics began or fluid motion or how thermodynamics began. He had nothing to say about that whatsoever.
-- Ben Stein -
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
-- Bill Bryson -
Whenever I want to represent or depict the official version, I will refer to them as 'mathematicians' or 'mathematical physicists' or idiots or something like that. There are no physicists in mainstream 'Physics.' From Newton to Einstein to Hawking, they are all just mathematicians as far as Science and Physics are concerned.
-- Bill Gaede -
A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.
-- Bill Gaede -
If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!
-- Bill Gaede -
The mathematicians of this world regard themselves as 'physicists,' yet they know next to nothing about Physics.
-- Bill Gaede -
And within the world that you've created, the physics of that world have to remain constant; they can't be amorphous and changing.
-- Bill Sienkiewicz -
Quantum physics is a bit of a passion of mine. It's extraordinary. There's a branch of mathematics that is based on lunacy, and that's wonderful.
-- Bob Hoskins -
Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'
-- Brian Greene -
The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.
-- Brian Greene -
...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.
-- Brian Greene -
When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.
-- Brian Greene -
The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a universe made out of energy, everything is entangled; everything is one.
-- Bruce H. Lipton -
What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.
-- Bruce H. Lipton -
Classical physics has been superseded by quantum theory: quantum theory is verified by experiments. Experiments must be described in terms of classical physics.
-- Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker -
It's physics. Pure physics, I'm falling fast and faster still. So fall with me. Fall down with me. And stay.
-- Cecily von Ziegesar -
Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture.
-- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji -
Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.
-- Craig Ferguson -
It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.
-- Criss Jami -
A lot of my theories were not applicable as a closer
-- Curt Schilling -
The laws of physics is the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece
-- Dan Brown -
It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
-- Daniel Bernoulli -
Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.
-- Daniel H. Wilson -
I was always good at math and science and physics.
-- Daniel J. Evans -
physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.
-- David Bentley Hart -
Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.
-- David Hilbert -
One of the most beautiful papers in physics that I know of is yours in the American Journal of Physics.
-- David Mermin -
I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus.
-- Debi Thomas -
Digital mechanics predicts that for every continuous symmetry of physics there will be some microscopic process that violates that symmetry.
-- Edward Fredkin -
Physics without mathematics is meaningless.
-- Edward Teller -
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.
-- Edward Teller -
Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
-- Edward Witten -
It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism.
-- Elizabeth Lesser -
Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.
-- Elizabeth Moon -
There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.
-- Eric Allin Cornell -
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
The more physics you have the less engineering you need.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.
-- Erwin Schrodinger -
Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.
-- Eva Herzigova -
I just really like ants, and I really like science. I was interested and curious about the quantum world and the physics behind how it all works.
-- Evangeline Lilly -
If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us?!
-- Frank J. Tipler -
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.
-- Frank Wilczek -
In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.
-- Frank Wilczek -
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.
-- Freeman Dyson -
The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.
-- Friedrich Durrenmatt -
In modern physics, the universe is experienced as a dynamic inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way.
-- Fritjof Capra -
Measure what can be measured, and make measureable what cannot be measured.
-- Galileo Galilei -
I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between.
-- George Polya -
I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.
-- Hannes Alfven -
This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.
-- Hans Christian von Baeyer -
In geometric and physical applications, it always turns out that a quantity is characterized not only by its tensor order, but also by symmetry.
-- Hermann Weyl -
Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.
-- Israel Gelfand -
There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.
-- James D. Watson -
The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.
-- James Joseph Sylvester -
In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.
-- James Rainwater -
They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.
-- James Stockdale -
Chemistry is the dirty part of physics.
-- Johann Philipp Reis -
The laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but.
-- John Archibald Wheeler -
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
-- John B. S. Haldane -
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
-- John Banville -
I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.
-- John Henry Carver -
So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
-- John Polkinghorne -
Going to the moon is not a matter of physics but of economics.
-- John R. Platt -
The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.
-- John von Neumann -
The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true.
-- John Ziman -
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.
-- Joseph Silk -
Laws of physics laws of love of time and space and the (in)between place (in)between you and me and where we are lost and looking looking and lost
-- Kami Garcia -
The physics of the 21st century shall deal essentially with non-spatial matter and non-spatial mechanics.
-- Kedar Joshi -
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
-- Ken Burns -
You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.
-- Ken Jennings -
Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.
-- Ken Wilber -
I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.
-- Laura San Giacomo -
It really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.
-- Lawrence M. Krauss
