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...

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...

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,...

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem...

In fact a favourite problem of 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.

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...

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to...

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

… it is shameful that there are so few women in science… In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This...

If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do...

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle – with equations.

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology...

The standard cosmological theory–an expanding universe–does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient...

When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly…he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science…Possibly in one or...

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and...

The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking … the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a...

PHYSICS to me.. umm well it’s like ENERGY, spreading in all DIMENSION of mind which tends to the TENSION, which FORCES the MOTION to come out.

Bohr’s standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science....

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the...

Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

One of the various theories proposed to explain the negative result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment with light waves (conceived to measure the absolute space), was based on the ballistic hypothesis, i.e. on postulating that...

…rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for “connections” in nature than...

Time can change the laws of physics.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned...

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...

[On the practical applications of particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider.]Sometimes the public says, ‘What’s in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get...

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

I’ve always liked all the sciences, like math, physics and biology.

Without the time, the world is only a static material; without the sense, the world is only a dead living system

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons...

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn’t pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much...

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must...

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would...

As was the case for Nobel’s own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

All have the ability to perceive and live in dimensional synthesis, yet they spend time with the sciences trying to separate these realms, splitting the worlds into minutia, seeking the god particle. They are searching...

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there....

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it’s done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period...

Light brings us the news of the Universe.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the...

Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.