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Quotations on Physics 69 Quotes Found I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics. I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs. My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics. Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics. I went to the University of Washington as a physics and astronomy major. My other interest, of course, was aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot. And if you're going to fly airplanes, the best place to be is the Air Force. Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature. 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. Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time. I was the Chair of the first department of medical physics in a medical school in the U.S. The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job. The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force. I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics. My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine. My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity. Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology. In 1971 I returned to the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics. Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics. A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory. Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know. I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it. The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved. I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time. Experimental high energy physics research is a group effort. I have been very fortunate to have had outstanding students and colleagues who have made invaluable contributions to the research with which I have been associated. The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time. How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications. That attitude does not exist so much today, but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics. In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing. Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots. When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable. From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary. Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern. The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting. It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists. I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind. Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance. You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination. When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition. Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy. It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry. At the moment I'm doing this space movie, so I'm obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it's gone. Then I'll be able to superficially say stuff about space. I'm the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys' school in Sydney. Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
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