Physicist Quotes - Page 11

• Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

  Harold Lewis

  Successful, Long, Global Warming

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• There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a hottest part implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

  Richard Davisson

  Running, Science, Differences

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• To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

  Francis Crick

  Nature, Lying, Science

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• But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5

  Brian Greene

  Past, Illusion, Said

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• Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

  Hans Christian von Baeyer

  Lying, Land, Numbers

  "Information: The New Language of Science". Book by Hans Christian von Baeyer, 2004.

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• I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines - there are the scientists, and there are the humanities people, and there are chemists and the physicists and everybody snipes at everybody else and inter-disciplinary communication is rare. But it's very precious and necessary.

  Richard Lewontin

  Communication, America, Australia

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Reality is what kicks back when you kick it. This is just what physicists do with their particle accelerators. We kick reality and feel it kick back. From the intensity and duration of thousands of those kicks over many years, we have formed a coherent theory of matter and forces, called the standard model, that currently agrees with all observations.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Science, Reality, Agreement

  Victor J. Stenger (2003). “Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe”, Pyr Books

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• The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.

  Pierre Duhem

  Ambition, Mad, Despair

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• The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand - i.e., the metaphysics of quantum theory - is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

  Fritjof Capra

  Science, Acceptance, Successful

  "The Tao of Physics". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

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• Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?

  Wernher von Braun

  God, Real, Airplane

  Letter to California State board of Education, September 14, 1972.

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• If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

  Clifford Stoll

  Teacher, Writing, Years

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• In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.

  Louis Pasteur

  Moving, Memorable, Science

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• I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am-most of them theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper thinkers than I am, I have broader interests than they have.

  Linus Pauling

  Smart, Theoretical Physics, People

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• Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter.

  Fritjof Capra

  Essence, Shiva, Matter

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• Gradually, physicists began to realise that nature, at the atomic level, does not appear as a mechanical universe composed of fundamental building blocks, but rather as a network of relations, and that, ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web. Whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures our attention.

  Fritjof Capra

  Block, Doe, Attention

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• [on what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common] I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence.

  Enrico Fermi

  Winning, Thinking, Common

  Physics Today, October 1994.

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• Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties. That's really wrong. Many of the libertarians are physicists, and many of the Tea Party people don't bathe. There's really not much in common there!

  Alan Grayson

  Party, People, Tea

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• Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

  W. G. Sebald

  Past, Layers, Emotion

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• Physicists, being in no way different from the rest of the population, have short memories for what is inconvenient.

  Anthony Standen

  Memories, Population, Different

  Anthony Standen (1950). “Science is a sacred cow”

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• All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Differences, People, Musician

  Eric Hobsbawm (2014). “The Jazz Scene”, p.296, Faber & Faber

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• But although in theory physicists realize that their conclusions are ... not certainly true, this ... does not really sink into their consciousness. Nearly all the time ... they ... act as if Science were indisputably True, and what's more, as if only science were true.... Any information obtained otherwise than by the scientific method, although it may be true, the scientists will call "unscientific," using this word as a smear word, by bringing in the connotation from its original [Greek] meaning, to imply that the information is false, or at any rate slightly phony.

  Anthony Standen

  Science, Greek, Doe

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• I'm really fascinated by the parallels between quantum theory and the teachings of some of these ancient texts. So many of the things that quantum physicists are talking about today, like non-locality and the observer effect, are things the yogis have been saying for thousands of years.

  Beryl Bender Birch

  Teaching, Talking, Years

  "Beryl Bender Birch: Abhyasa and Avoiding Flying Tomatoes". Interview with Andrea Marcum, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Without perceiving things through the old filter of past conditioning and conceptualization, one can sense the universe is intensely alive. Even so-called inanimate objects - I often pick up little objects and just look at them and sense that they are alive. Physicists actually confirm that what we perceive as dead matter is not dead at all. Everything is an intensely alive energy field. That aliveness is only an aspect of the aliveness or life that I am.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Past, Energy, Filters

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• I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.

  Vandana Shiva

  Hero, Order, Years

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• Chemists are, on the whole, like physicists, only 'less so'.They don't make quite the same wonderful mistakes, and much what they do is an art, related to cooking, instead of a true science. They have their moments, and their sources of legitimate pride. They don't split atoms, as the physicists do. They join them together, and a very praiseworthy activity that is.

  Anthony Standen

  Art, Mistake, Pride

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