682 Quotes About Physics

Science ... it works.

I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics,” Darger said. “She is, in either case, ravishing.

Sabiendo que estaban reunidos [...] por una curiosa perversión de la física, como si las relaciones entre la gente estuvieran sujetas a las mismas leyes que regían la relación entre átomos y moléculas.

The significance of [the fine-structure constant] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. [Forces of Nature]

...quantum problems unseat many classical ideas about matter, causality, and change that biologists use, and that disruption in turn entails radical revisions to the ideas about the mechanism in evolution, in ways we don't yet acknowledge.

...every physicist knows that the laws of physics can be used to build a gun or a bicycle; physics does not dictate a specific use for its laws. To that extent, it should be obvious that the laws of physics are incomplete in predicting everything that occurs in nature—from Moral Materialism

It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.

There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women over this discovery than I would have believed possible.

Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the "kan". That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the "millikan".