Physics Quotes

“We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it's form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist.”
― Mohammed Ali

“Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.”
― Rivka Galchen

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”
― Eugene Paul Wigner

“Maybe knowledge is as fundamental, or even more fundamental than [material] reality.”
― Anton Zeilinger

“What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.”
― Murray Gell-Mann

“A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“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, Why God Doesn't Exist

“A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.”
― Bill Gaede

“A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works.”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays—using them like a magnet!! Incredible!"

There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers.”
― James Kakalios, The Physics of Superheroes

“Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.”
― John Twelve Hawks, The Dark River

“The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“We are the last generation of humans on Earth!”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell and having the bell keep on ringing. Sweet - who said his ideas came to him in dreams - turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets could be used to produce electricity, and wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other than the standard induction process. What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of motion. Sweet thought that if cosmic energy could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy would keep it moving.”
― Jeane Manning, Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World

“It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to why they can be blown at all.”
― C. Vernon Boys

“Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.”
― Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?

“...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.”
― M.-L. von Franz

“I tell you about a fact and truth. In physical reality of matter,
there's no such thing as an imaginary spirit nor spiritual ghost.
They are also made of matter, but totally different in size and
laws of physics which rule their life and the way they interact.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Without the time, the world is only a static material; without the sense, the world is only a dead living system”
― Aditia Rinaldi

“It was like bouncing tennis balls off a mystery piece of furniture and deducing, from the direction in which the balls ricocheted, whether it was a chair or a table or a Welsh dresser.”
― Marcus Chown, We Need to Talk About Kelvin

“Everything exists because other things cause it to exist, otherwise, it exists and doesn't exist at all.”
― Joey Lawsin, The Single Theory Of Everything

“At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the participants' favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation came in first with thirteen votes, while the many-worlds interpretation came in second with eight. Another nine votes were scattered among other alternatives. Most interesting, eighteen votes were cast for "None of the above/undecided." And these are the experts.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“There is no theory of everything,
because everything is a theory.
There is no perception of reality,
everything is perception, nothing is reality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn

“The nervous system dictates what that soul attracts into her life. If your neurons are destroyed, you won't know where you are, what you want or where you want to go.”
― Vivienne Lamb, Outsmarting the Ego: The Physics of Evil

“As vivid as it may appear to us, our experience of the passage of time does not need to reflect a fundamental aspect of reality.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“A realidade, inclusive nós, é apenas um ténue e frágil véu, além do qual... não há nada.”
― Carlo Rovelli, BURACOS BRANCOS

“Physicist Paul Davies tells us that “science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn’t made by a god or a supernatural being,” and acknowledges that, partially out of fear of “open[ing] the door to religious fundamentalists . . . many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.” Among prominent contemporary philosophers, Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“My estimate for the northern lights in Oregon being predicted correctly seems to be about 5% accuracy.”
― Steven Magee

“Most of the time the Oregon aurora prediction is wrong.”
― Steven Magee

“Numbers are the tongue of time and space.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee