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.

I am an atheist.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.

That’s absolutely correct and in addition to that life just isn’t an accident of the laws of physics. There’s a long list of experiments that suggest just the opposite.

She figured that the main problem in physics is physicists, that most of them are caught in a mind trap because they’re so used to things being made of smaller things. So they instinctively believe...

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.The other students in the class...

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that...

If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself… For brevity’s sake I shall use the...

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all . . .

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in...

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and...

While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity...

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...

…in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can’t be measured and that therefore can’t be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying “such-and-such will happen in every case.” All...

Time is the key to the heart of physics.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself...

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation...

Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above...

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]Oh, no. Absolutely not… The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to...

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth’s atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth’s external crust, and finally of the origin and development of...

O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of...

Metaphysics is the other end of physics.

We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it’s form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist.

Through Jung [Pauli] became very interested in various kinds of mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. This led Pauli to develop a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the world’s greatest authority in that field and in the Cabala,...

…I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It...

Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics

If you can’t illustrate ‘it’, ‘it’ doens’t belong in Physics as a noun! You can’t put an article in front. You can’t put a verb after!

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant … 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated...

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called...