The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

When you hurt someone, it initiates a chemical reaction in that person’s body that changes his/her mental condition. That means you are disturbing the arrangement of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons. These particles are...

A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic…

At his “World of Physics” Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Credentials are like potential energy, the compliments of a name on paper, in documents, word of mouth, but faith is like kinetic energy, the motion and the force that which is witnessed. Hence in the...

How much does a beam of light weigh?

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.

It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physical optics and appears to open...

In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.{Advising his student, Max Planck, whom he advised in 1878, not to go into physics, at at...

In the beginning, there was physics. “Physics” describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena....

The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of...

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to...

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a...

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.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force...

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to...

The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

When I was young, I thought it is thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in the high school, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice...

Alpha sets the scale of nature — the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It...

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by...

Objects moving in a circle are under the influence of changing force.

Good metaphysics has its roots in good physics.

…in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing ‘first cause’ problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.

You can never repeal the laws of physics, and a smaller, lighter vehicle is always at a disadvantage no matter how many safety features are built into it.

Perhaps there are many “nows” of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing...

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don’t think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting...