69 quotes found
“Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.”
“One may characterize physics as the doctrine of the repeatable, be it a succession in time or the co-existence in space. The validity of physical theorems is founded on this repeatability.”
“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.”
“Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.”
“Objects moving in a circle are under the influence of changing force.”
“The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?”
“Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any cas...”
“The measurement of human ability is in an infant state. Was it a requirement for the Wright Brothers to hold PhDs before they could invent and take flight?”
“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”
“An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.”
“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 watchmaker. ...”
“Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.”
“God abhors a naked singularity.”
“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?”
“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. The only thi...”
“The laws of physics could be like an onion, with new laws becoming operational as we probe new scales. We simply don't know!”
“Joes scientific life is defined by these significant near misses He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost t...”
“It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics.”
“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 ...”
“Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.”
