682 Quotes About Physics

At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).

There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar. This appellation was not meant ironically.

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world.

We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.

Alpha, known as the fine-structure constant, characterizes the interactions between matter and light. It has been very accurately measured in the laboratory. It is indeed the most precisely measured of all physical constants ... best memorized in the form ~ 1/137.

The measured magnetic moment, together with fine structure constant determined by a different method, is the most stringent test of QED and the Standard Model of particle physics. The measured magnetic moment and QED theory together yield the most precise measured value of the fine structure constant.

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.

If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.