Relativity Quotes - Page 9

• Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

  Adam Savage

  Beautiful, Fractals, Theory

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• The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.

  Norbert Wiener

  Friday, Monday, Sunday

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• The revolution which began with the creation of quantum theory and relativity theory can only be finished with their unification into a single theory that can give us a single, comprehensive picture of nature.

  Lee Smolin

  Giving, Words Of Wisdom, Revolution

  Lee Smolin (1999). “The Life of the Cosmos”, p.5, Oxford University Press, USA

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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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• I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. Bu t my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

  Albert Einstein

  Children, Thinking, Space

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• By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Lying, Moving, Science

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• I heard that in relativity theory, space and time are the same thing. Einstein discovered this when he kept showing up three miles late for his meetings.

  Steven Wright

  Space, Three, Showing Up

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• If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Successful

  Address to French Philosophical Society, Paris, 6 Apr. 1922

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• I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

  Edward Teller

  Simple, Common Sense, Way

  Edward Teller, Wendy Teller, Wilson Talley (2013). “Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics”, p.2, Basic Books

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• Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

  Mark Haddon

  Speaks French, Understanding, Difficult

  Mark Haddon (2012). “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Vintage Children's Classics”, p.56, Random House

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• That's the feeling [of relativity] I always had about [Judy Blume] books which I re-read and re-read and re-read.

  Lena Dunham

  Book, Feelings

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Let me tell you about Australia. It's really, really, really, far from wherever you live on Earth. You fly and you fly and you fly. Then relativity takes over and you get younger and younger. And when you land, you're a gleam in your father's eye.

  Greg Proops

  Father, Eye, Land

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• Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Yang, Structure, Mills

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• Einstein didn't speak until he was four, leading most of his teachers to believe he was crazy. That is until he whipped out the theory of relativity. BAYUM! Showed you guys.

  Albert Einstein

  Teacher, Crazy, Believe

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• No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

  Brian Greene

  Cat, Trying, Matter

  NOVA interview, www.pbs.org. October 28, 2003.

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• Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Girl, Education

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• The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Real, Frustration, Vanity

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• It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Eye, Science, Technology

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.219, Ultramarine Publishing

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• There is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever... One exists in eternity, one has become eternal... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.

  Terence McKenna

  Moving, Light, Views

  "New Maps of Hyperspace". Terence McKenna's speech at the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness (1984) as quoted in "Magical Blend Magazine", Issue #22, April 1989.

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• It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed[..].

  Robert B. Laughlin

  Space, Creative, Ironic

  Robert B. Laughlin (2008). “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down”, p.99, Basic Books

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• On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

  Albert Einstein

  Grease, Brain, Use

  Quoted by Otto Stern in an interview with Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962.

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• Doesn't the theory of relativity concern literature too? In our world there is no longer any room for the privileged observer, as there is none for the observer of the universe - we are all within.

  Nina Berberova

  Our World, Rooms, Literature

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• Relativity. Gravity. Quantum. Electrodynamics. Evolution. Each of these theories is true, whether or not you believe in them.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Believe, Religion, Atheism

  Twitter post from Nov 10, 2014

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• The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Vocabulary, Blind Spots, People

  Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

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• I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the theory of relativity is, but I think what we all really want to know anyways, is whether we're loved or not.

  Rich Mullins

  Thinking, Want, Theory

  Concert in Wheaton, Illinois, www.kidbrothers.net. April 11, 1997.

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