All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Newton’s laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren’t that simple

By now, he was also a ‘Protestant Atheist’, which he remained all his life.

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that...

…Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book – is obesity? This is biology folks, it’s endocrinology, it’s physiology – physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but]...

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course....

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

The physics is theoretical but time is real.

Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are)...

Einstein’s paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared – his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That’s what it was like to...

My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes.

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably,...

Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.

Define the word exist, and you’ll know whether God exists.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying...

If these d’Herelle bodies were really genes, fundamentally like our chromosome genes, they would give us an utterly new angle from which to attack the gene problem. They are filterable, to some extent isolable, can be handled in test-tubes, and their properties, as shown by their effects on the bacteria, can then be studied after...

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality…Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

Alpha, known as the fine-structure constant, characterizes the interactions between matter and light. It has been very accurately measured in the laboratory. It is indeed the most precisely measured of all physical constants … best memorized in the form ~ 1/137.

The human mind is woven into the energy fabric of the universe.John A. Wheeler

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is...

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

We are at the dawn of a new era, the era of ‘molecular biology’ as I like to call it, and there is an urgency about the need for more intensive application of physics and chemistry, and specially of structure analysis, that is still not sufficiently appreciated.

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty

In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of...

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape...

I do not think the division of the subject into two parts – into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are...

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to...

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution...

Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT!

During my stay in London I resided for a considerable time in Clapham Road in the neighbourhood of Clapham Common… One fine summer evening I was returning by the last bus ‘outside’ as usual, through the deserted streets of the city, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie...

INTERNATIONAL scientists said they had found signs of the Higgs boson, an elementary subatomic particle believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe after the Big Bang.Peter Higgs is an 86-year-old British theoretical physicist who first proposed the existence of the particle in 1964 as the missing link of a...

The very nature of the quantum theory … forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.

If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how...

It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea...

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the...

We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.

Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.){A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by...

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

If we ascribe the ejection of the proton to a Compton recoil from a quantum of 52 x 106 electron volts, then the nitrogen recoil atom arising by a similar process should have an energy not greater than about 400,000 volts, should produce not more than about 10,000 ions, and have a range in the...

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter...

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. …The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. …Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.

Math is the dirty part of physics.

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.