Relativity Theory Quotes

“Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.
quoting, David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan”

— Winifred Gallagher

“During the 1919 solar eclipse, people go out to measure the positions of the stars and they find exactly what Einstein predicted. Einstein gets a telegram saying this, and somebody asked him, Professor Einstein, what would you have said if the observations didn't agree with what your prediction of general relativity said should be happening? And Einstein said, "I'd be sorry for the dear lord; the theory is correct." What he meant by that is the math is just so elegant, so beautiful, so powerful, that almost seemingly it can't possibly be wrong.”

— Rivka Galchen

“Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.”

— Fritjof Capra

“I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and [it is] partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science. You have to know something about relativity theory, for example, to know where opponents of Einstein go wrong ... Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society.”

— Martin Gardner

“Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein's wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don't forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.”

— Betty Friedan

“When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether.”

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”

— Sam Kean

“If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?”

— Felix Alba-Juez

“As we already pointed out, 'special' means 'restricted to Inertial Frames of Reference', i.e. this theory cannot describe the Universe from an arbitrary reference frame. This restricted scope is not to be ignored, though not overemphasized either ...
Ironically, and precisely because of the great success of this simple version of Relativity Theory, most of its detractors have chosen to ignore (out of ignorance or malice
you judge case by case) its philosophical foundation and restriction to Inertial Frames, so as to declare it invalid.”

— Felix Alba-Juez

“One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you've got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.”

— Justin Cronin

“The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.”

— Robert Nozick

“The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit.”

— Andrea M. Ghez

“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

“Now, from special relativity we know that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin: Greater energy means greater mass, and vice versa. Thus, according to string theory, the mass of an elementary particle is determined by the energy of the vibrational pattern of its internal string. Heavier particles have internal strings that vibrate more energetically, while lighter particles have internal strings that vibrate less energetically.”

— Brian Greene

“It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system.”

— Talcott Parsons

“It is worth noting that a wrong folkoric definition of an Inertial Frame in the Popular Science literature (even in text books) reads that 'it is a frame in uniform motion'. We know very well by now that the idea of motion requires a frame of reference, so that such a definition of an Inertial Frame has no meaning whatsoever, confusing the reader because it tacitly reaffirms the idea of absolute motion
when the goal of every didactic exposition of Relativity Theory should be precisely the opposite.”

— Felix Alba-Juez

“The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general.”

— Jiang Zemin

“General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.”

— Paul Davies

“This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)”

— Don DeLillo

“String theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner. I do believe the universe is consistent, and therefore I do believe that general relativity and quantum mechanics should be put together in a manner that makes sense.”

— Brian Greene

“Never be ashamed of madness, instead be ashamed of people that are ashamed of madness. Without a little bit of insanity, we would have never had the Theory of Relativity, electricity, airplanes, cars or your beloved iPhone. Madness got you that.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“In the early universe-when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory-there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the "beginning" of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics.”

— Stephen Hawking

“The rotating armatures of every generator and motor in this age of electricity are steadily proclaiming the truth of the relativity theory to all who have ears to hear.”

— Leigh Page

“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

“The importance of C.F. Gauss for the development of modern physical theory and especially for the mathematical fundament of the theory of relativity is overwhelming indeed; also his achievement of the system of absolute measurement in the field of electromagnetism. In my opinion it is impossible to achieve a coherent objective picture of the world on the basis of concepts which are taken more or less from inner psychological experience.”

— Albert Einstein

“The last I knew you were going to a party. just a few friends at the McEvoys' you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight about the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble?”

— Tami Hoag

“The 4D style, or cosmic comics and relativistic humor, is based on Einstein's theory of relativity which I came up with 20 years ago. 4D works use the idea of the fourth dimension, time, playing on such surrealistic and amazing subjects as motion relativity, space curvature and time dilation.”

— Javad Alizadeh

“The difficulty involved in the proper and adequate means of describing changes in continuous deformable bodies is the method of differential equations ... They express mathematically the physical concept of contiguous action.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity”

— Max Born

“Some scientist needs to explain to spectators Einstein's relativity theory. Before his explanation, he says: 'I have to suffer a lot explaining something I don't understand myself.' This relates to my game: I didn't understand anything!”

— Vassily Ivanchuk

“I have read various articles on the fourth dimension, the relativity theory of Einstein, and other psychological speculation on the constitution of the universe; and after reading them I feel as Senator Brandegee felt after a celebrated dinner in Washington. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter."”

— Charles Lane Poor

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

— Chen-Ning Yang

“String theory?[pause] It closed the conceptual gulp between relativity and quantum mechanics. It postulates that subatomic particles are not points, but strings, about one planck length long. The rate at which strings vibrate can generate the properties of all known particles. Huh? How did I know that?”

— Willie Garson

“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

“Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.”

— L. Neil Smith

“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

“When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.”

— Albert Einstein

“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

“At present every coachman and every waiter argues about whether or not the relativity theory is correct.”

— Albert Einstein

“Now to the term 'relativity theory.' I admit that it is unfortunate, and has given occasion to philosophical misunderstandings.”

— Albert Einstein

“In my relativity theory I set up a clock at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to provide even one clock in my room.”

— Albert Einstein

“Some men spend a lifetime in an attempt to comprehend the complexities of women. Others pre-occupy themselves with somewhat simpler tasks, such as understanding the theory of relativity!”

— Albert Einstein

“However we select from nature a complex [of phenomena] using the criterion of simplicity, in no case will its theoretical treatment turn out to be forever appropriate (sufficient) ... I do not doubt that the day will come when [general relativity], too, will have to yield to another one, for reasons which at present we do not yet surmise. I believe that this process of deepening theory has no limits.”

— Albert Einstein

“I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards.”

— Albert Einstein

“I believe my theory of relativity to be true. But it will only be proved for certain in 1981, when I am dead.”

— Albert Einstein

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

— Adam Savage

“Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.”

— James C. Collins

“I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.”

— G.H. Hardy

“General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.”

— Brian Greene

“Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.”

— Quentin Crisp