682 Quotes About Physics

The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

The hardest part of research is always to find a question that’s big enough that it’s worth answering, but little enough that you actually can answer it.

The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microsoptic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally percieves the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes.

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.

Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed

Away from the top of the throat [of variations of Calabi-Yau conifolds with warped throats], the two geometries look almost identical, and people used to think they could be used interchangeably. Shiu and I showed that the details do matter.

Pure english (3 o'clock or 9 o'clock), when shot perpendicular into a rail, creates a rebound of 22 1/2 degrees. Each additional hour clockwise on the same side of the cue ball moves the result one diamond counter-clockwise on the table (and vice-versa).

I wonder if the explanation is even more complex than we imagine at present.