Physics Quotes - page 37
Hard to categorize other than as conjurors - singers of strange, sometimes acutely humorous songs . It is to three of the greatest entertainers in the field that we now turn. Entertainers whose dark, humanistic humour might be said genuinely to reflect the spirit of the decade: Robert Sheckley, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Philip K. Dick.
Sheckley has a wry inventiveness which skates him over profound depths, and a sense of playfulness even in his darkest moments. The 'science' in Sheckley's work is not physics but metaphysics and his protagonists are wide-eyed innocents sent on journeys designed to disillusion the widest-eyed idealist. Thomas Blaine in Immortality Inc. (1959) and Joenes in Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1963) are typical of this Candide archetype.
Robert Sheckley
Spinoza was the man I believed in always, as the alternative to Catholicism. And it is only in Spinoza's manner that I am a positivist at all. I believe in the real world, in the world of thought and extension, of psychology and physics. God or substance with Spinoza equals reality; and this reality, which may have countless forms, we find only in space and in (other men's) consciousness. I say in other men's, because Spinoza was too sane to care to discuss anything from the point of view of subjective idealism. When one prints a book to convince other people, one oughtn't to discuss in it whether they exist. But this is all by the way, although some other day I will discuss with you the question of Spinoza's hedonism.
Baruch Spinoza
After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein's theory of relativity - now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.
Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.
Piet Hein
They dug too far into physics and it bit them. Physics will do that. It's an ungrateful piece of shit. It's a fickle lover that will always betray you. It courts you, gives you rewards, coughs up little treats like fire and the wheel, telescopes and the secret of starflight, makes you think you're worth it, that you're the special one, that you really, really matter to it....All the while it's saving up this nasty little truth: that every thought, every deed, every hope you've ever held is futile. That the universe will end, and forget itself. That there is no such thing as meaning....
"Do you believe it?” Goma asked.
"Of course I believe it. Physics doesn't give a damn about how we feel. It doesn't give a damn about a sleeping soundly in our beds, thinking we matter.
Alastair Reynolds
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out - without putting it in secretly!
Richard Feynman
People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is!... And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it... My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.
Richard Feynman
As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.
Richard Feynman
In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy.
Werner Heisenberg
Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics... Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
It was a bank holiday, and Mr Tompkins, the little clerk of a big city bank, slept late and had a leisurely breakfast. Trying to plan his day, he first thought about going to some afternoon movie and, opening the morning paper, turned to the entertainment page. But none of the films looked attractive to him. He detested all this Hollywood stuff, with infinite romances between popular stars.
If only there were at least one film with some real adventure, something unusual and maybe even fantastic about it. But there was none. Unexpectedly, his eye fell on a little notice in the corner of the page. The local university was announcing a series of lectures on the problems of modern physics, and this afternoon's lecture was to be about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Well, that might be something!
George Gamow
Which is Better: the Latke or the Hamantash?” is not a valid question, even though this has now been debated for 50 years.
* The question does not exhibit the necessary property of universality.
* It is culturally biased, implies gender specificity, exhibits geographical chauvinism and appeals to special interests.
* It is not value-free.
This question would not pass scrutiny on an SAT test, since it unfairly favors one ethnic and gender group over another: e.g., it favors the NY and Brooklyn establishment over the Midwest Rust Belt, and pits female latke workers against male hamantash bakers. In short, it is Politically Incorrect. Physics does not ask which is better: the proton or neutron, baryon or lepton, helium or neon, the conductor or insulator. These are simply properties of nature. Rather, physics asks: "Why?” or "Which is more important or more fundamental?” or "Who published it first?
Isaac Abella
Well, a big question is how did the universe begin. And we, cannot answer that question. Some people think that the big bang is an explanation of how the universe began, its not. The big bang is a theory of how the universe evolved from a split second after whatever brought it into existence. And the reason why we've been unable to look right back at time zero, to figure out how it really began; is that conflict between Einstein's ideas of gravity and the laws of quantum physics. So, string theory may be able to - it hasn't yet; we're working on it today - feverishly. It may be able to answer the question, how did the universe begin. And I don't know how it'll affect your everyday life, but to me, if we really had a sense of how the universe really began, I think that would, really, alert us to our place in the cosmos in a deep way.
Brian Greene
Then I went to the Cavendish and there I took Rutherford's course in nuclear physics. He was a very dramatic lecturer and full of anecdotes. He made it come alive. So this was very impressive--also very phenomenological, everything he did; very simple derivations. I think that's very important for the first learning and this is perhaps something students now miss. They get the theory of nuclear physics thrown at them; sometimes before they ever know there is a phenomenon they have the complete theory of it. The phenomena are not sufficiently emphasized, I think, in teaching today.
Maurice Goldhaber
When that amusing "Pauli effect" of the overturned vase occurred, on the occasion of the founding of the Jung Institute, I had the immediate and vivid impression that I should "pour out water inside" (- to use the symbolic language that I have acquired from you). Then when the connection between psychology and physics took up a relatively large part of your talk, it became even more clear to me what I was to do. The outcome of all this is the enclosed essay.
Wolfgang Pauli
In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we know better now." What exactly do we know better now? Do we know better that one should not infer from the physical to the political realm and if yes, why? Or do we know better that the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum physics the one that confidently announced the final overthrow of causality and the ordinary conception of reality is not the only possible interpretation, and that, ultimately, it might not even be the surviving one?
Mara Beller
The metaphor of Indra's Net also suggests a creative intelligence which is omnipresent, permeating all life. All appearances of separateness are maya (illusory). The capacity of one jewel to reflect the light of every other within this infinite net is difficult for the linear mind to comprehend, but it serves as an apt precursor to an understanding of multidimensional theories which have emerged in physics and metaphysics.
Thus, long before modern science, Indra's Net provided an excellent metaphor for what is now recognized as the main quality of the hologram, which is that every area of the hologram contains information on the whole.
Rajiv Malhotra
The discovery of the double helix sounded the death knell for vitalism. Serious scientists, even those religiously inclined, realized that a complete understanding of life would not require the revelation of new laws of nature. Life was just a matter of physics and chemistry, albeit exquisitely organized physics and chemistry. The immediate task ahead would be to figure out how the DNA-encoded script of life went about its work.
James D. Watson
A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. The quintessential illustration of this jump in level is the way in which Newton's theory of mechanics explained Kepler's law of planetary motion. Basically, a law applies to observed phenomena in one domain (e.g., planetary bodies and their movements), while a theory is intended to unify phenomena in many domains. Thus, Newton's theory of mechanics explained not only Kepler's laws, but also Galileo's findings about the motion of balls rolling down an inclined plane, as well as the pattern of oceanic tides. Unlike laws, theories often postulate unobservable objects as part of their explanatory mechanism. So, for instance, Freud's theory of mind relies upon the unobservable ego, superego, and id, and in modern physics we have theories of elementary particles that postulate various types of quarks, all of which have yet to be observed.
Johannes Kepler
