Quotes About Physicists

“The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.”

— Max Planck

“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

“Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?”

— John Archibald Wheeler

“Time is just an illusion. Einstein told us that. If this is the first time you have heard it, you may find it a hard concept to get your head around, because you see everything happening-one thing after the other. What quantum physicists and Einstein tell us is that everything is happening simultaneously. If you can understand that there is no time, and accept that concept, then you will see that whatever you want in the future already exists. If everything is happening at the one time, then the parallel version of you with what you want already exists! It takes no time for the Universe to manifest what you want. Any time delay you experience is due to your delay in getting to the place of believing, knowing, and feeling that you already have it. It is you getting yourself on the frequency of what you want. When you are on that frequency, then what you want will appear.”

— Rhonda Byrne

“But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys.”

— James Gleick

“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? -RICHARD P. FEYNMAN”

— James Gleick

“Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.”

— Bill Bryson

“Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.”

— Alan Guth

“Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.”

— Fabiola Gianotti

“I confess I sometimes sneak a peek at 'The Big Bang Theory.' I chuckle at their antics. But I cringe when they portray physicists as clueless nerds who are doormats when it comes to picking up women.”

— Michio Kaku

“First, gravity and quantum mechanics are part and parcel of how the universe works and therefore any purported unified theory must incorporate both. String theory accomplishes this. Second, studies by physicists over the past century have revealed that there are other key ideas-many of which have been experimentally confirmed-that appear central to our understanding of the universe. These include the concepts of spin, the family structure of matter particles, messenger particles, gauge symmetry, the equivalence principle, symmetry breaking, and supersymmetry, to name a few. All of these concepts emerge naturally from string theory. Third, unlike more conventional theories such as the standard model, which has 19 free parameters that can be adjusted to ensure agreement with experimental measurements, string theory has no adjustable parameters. In principle, its implications should be thoroughly definitive-they should provide an unambiguous test of whether the theory is right or wrong.”

— Brian Greene

“I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.”

— Cynthia Breazeal

“Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.”

— David Hilbert

“There are now over 5,000 medical physicists in the U.S more than 50 times the number in 1958.”

— John Cameron

“I found collaborating with congenial doctors about problems that physicists could help solve was very satisfying. I also like educating anybody who would listen!”

— John Cameron

“The one, they reasoned, must have already existed in the other; for since everything that comes into being must arise either from what is or from what is not, and it is impossible for it to arise from what is not (on this point all the physicists agree), (35) they thought that the truth of the alternative necessarily followed, namely that things come into being out of existent things, i. e. out of things already present, but imperceptible to our senses because of the smallness of their bulk.”

— Aristotle

“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

“Physicists explain creation by telling us that the universe began with the Big Bang, an intense energy singularity that continued expanding. But who created the singularity?”

— Ashwin Sanghi

“Real gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak-and so difficult to detect that they have not yet been observed. The”

— Stephen Hawking

“Much of the writing of physicists barely reaches the level of prose.”

— Steven Weinberg

“Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

“Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

“It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.”

— Peter Watts

“We are fast approaching a situation in which nobody will believe anything we [physicists] say in any matter that touches upon our self-interest. Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or social value.”

— Leo Kadanoff

“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

“The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void.”

— Terence McKenna

“An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.”

— Steven Pinker

“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 itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.”

— Isidor Isaac Rabi

“If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating. And if the layman runs into serious perplexities, he can be consoled with the thought that the points which baffle him are more than likely the ones for which the professionals have not found satisfactory answers.”

— Edward Condon

“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

“The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.”

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

“Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.”

— George Iles

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

— Heinz Pagels

“Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists
especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.”

— Taner Edis

“The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is "something behind it all" is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists.”

— Paul Davies

“Today, we know that time travel need not be confined to myths, science fiction, Hollywood movies, or even speculation by theoretical physicists. Time travel is possible. For example, an object traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. This means that if you were to travel into outer space and return, moving close to light speed, you could travel thousands of years into the Earth's future.”

— Clifford A. Pickover

“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

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

— Douglas Adams

“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

“In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.”

— Edsger Dijkstra

“The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?”

— Edward Abbey

“Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here's a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand] [ ... ]. If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that's how you want to come at the problem”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“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

“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

“The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“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

“Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding