Physicist Quotes - Page 6

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  Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Beauty

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.15, St. Martin's Press

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• Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

  Heinz Pagels

  Science, Vacuums, Study

  Heinz R. Pagels (2012). “The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature”, p.279, Courier Corporation

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• Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Economist, Sociologists

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• The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .

  John Archibald Wheeler

  Jobs, Mistake, Theoretical

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• The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Reality, Portraits, Appearance

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."

  Arthur Compton

  Mean, Cutting, Science

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• It was my responsibility that this world got itself an atom bomb, because there were only a handful of nuclear physicists in the thirties - only a handful. And we were all beating the desk and saying "How wonderful it will be if we discover atomic fission."

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Responsibility, Atoms, Nuclear

  "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health". Book by L. Ron Hubbard, 1950.

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• Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

  George E. P. Box

  Believe, Engineering, Branches

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• We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.

  Frances M. Beal

  Teacher, Children, Reading

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• I don't think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A, that there is no consensus, and, B, that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

  "Obama Is Average". Interview with Klaus Brinkbäumer and Gregor-Peter Schmitz, www.spiegel.de. October 26, 2009.

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• Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Our World, Light, Wave

  "The Grandeur and Limits of Science". Interview with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. February 16, 2017.

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• There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Artist, People, Secret

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. November 13, 2011.

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• I really want to go into the future 500 years and be a quantum physicist. Not only would I get to see all the incredible inventions I know will be out there, but I'd be able to understand the science behind them!

  Caroline Leavitt

  Years, Want, Able

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• It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Historical, Mind

  "Philosophy in a New Key". Book by Susanne Langer, 1941.

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• There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Law, Imagine, Experiments

  Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands (2013). “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Desktop Edition Volume I”, Basic Books

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• To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

  Michio Kaku

  Needs, Passionate, Affair

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• Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).

  Ernst Mach

  Reality, Doe, Elements

  "The Analysis of Sensations". Book by Ernst Mach, 1897.

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• I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.

  G. H. Hardy

  Good Man, Example, Waste

  "Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work". Book by G. H. Hardy, 1940.

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• How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!"

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Impossible, Workplace, Problem

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. November 13, 2011.

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• When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

  James Rothman

  College, Yale, Becoming

  "A Nobel Prize Winner on Why We Need Foundational Research". Interview with Lisa Rosenbaum, www.newyorker.com. October 10, 2013.

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• A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory.

  Michio Kaku

  Effort, Soul, Trying

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

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• There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

  Rex Stout

  Earth, Tricks, Objects

  Rex Stout (1975). “A Family Affair: A Nero Wolfe Novel”, Viking Adult

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• Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race?

  Bertrand Russell

  Thinking, Race, Secret

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Unpopular Essays”, p.131, Routledge

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• Very strange people, physicists - in my experience the ones who aren't dead are in some way very ill.

  Douglas Adams

  People, Way, Strange

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• The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe.

  Michio Kaku

  Japan, Might, Able

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