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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[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...

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...

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...

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...

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.