Physicist Quotes - Page 18

• Being a physicist, not a philosopher, I have devised an entirely new theory of consciousness, allowing one to numerically calculate the level of consciounsess of humans and even animals.

  Michio Kaku

  Animal, Levels, Philosopher

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. March 7, 2014.

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• Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Law, Giving, Dollars

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• Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

  Alan Arkin

  Winning, Arbitrary, Actors

  "OSCARS Q&A: Alan Arkin". Interview with Pete Hammond, deadline.com. February 9, 2013.

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• Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era.

  Daniel Kleppner

  Book, Historical, Mind

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• Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

  Robert Frost

  Boys, Men, Imagination

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• Some people skip through life. Others are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder if we are moving through time, or whether time is moving through us. Light, unlike anything else in the universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.

  Donald Miller

  Moving, Light, People

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• Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

  Michio Kaku

  Atoms, Made, Astrophysics

  "How the Universe Works". www.imdb.com. 2010-.

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• Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

  Douglas Adams

  Party, Said, Respectable

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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• What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.

  William S. Burroughs

  Here And There, Littles, Facts

  William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

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• Cal ’s eyes reflected a weird combination of frenzy and fear as he twisted toward his father. “My God! She’s on her way to becoming the most famous physicist in the country, and she’sdumb as a post ! You arenot having your baby in this house! You’re having it at the county hospital!

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Country, Baby, Father

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• The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Engineering, Experience

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• Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.

  Walther Bothe

  Destiny, Essentials, Nuclear

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• The importance of group theory was emphasized very recently when some physicists using group theory predicted the existence of a particle that had never been observed before, and described the properties it should have. Later experiments proved that this particle really exists and has those properties.

  Irving Adler

  Science, Should Have, Groups

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• Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

  Abraham Pais

  Liars, Believe, Writing

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• The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

  Udny Yule

  Science, Opportunity, Data

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• The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.

  Pierre Duhem

  Science, Groups, Tests

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• At least this is the way I see it. I am a physicist. I also consider myself a Christian. As I try to understand the nature of our universe in these two modes of thinking, I see many commonalities and crossovers between science and religion. It seems logical that in the long run the two will even converge.

  Charles Hard Townes

  Christian, Running, Thinking

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• We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists' attempts to describe nature.

  Alexander Markovich Polyakov

  Atheism, Chance, Mathematics

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• Perhaps the best argument...that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas...being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.

  Christopher Isham

  Atheist, Lying, Ideas

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• At a certain stage of our progressive attainment, every Initiate undergoes an "Illumination by Sound" in which the Music of the Spheres becomes to us a living reality. When the magical powers of sound are rediscovered and scientifically directed to the specific purpose of healing... and when man has learned how to release the mantraic powers embodied in such inspired utterances, he will master the energies transcending even those unleashed by the atomic physicist of today. They will be energies of yet another and higher dimension.

  Corinne Heline

  Inspiration, Healing, Reality

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• If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Reality, Imagination

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Essays in Science”, p.17, Open Road Media

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• [Physicists] feel that the field of bacterial viruses is a fine playground for serious children who ask ambitious questions.

  Max Delbruck

  Children, Science, Ambitious

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• Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Years, Long, Males

  "Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists". www.nytimes.com. October 3, 2006.

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• Faith should be pulled into the public arena when it affects how we live. If it doesn't, it does no earthly good. What does my faith say about the fact that a girl can't be a nuclear physicist because she's black and from the inner city? My faith says, no, that's not what God intended. It pulls it back into the public arena the idea that there's got to be something fair for all of us.

  Jeremiah Wright

  Girl, Cities, Ideas

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.

  Paul Dirac

  Art, People, Appreciate

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.908, Cambridge University Press

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