Mechanics Quotes - page 3
My mind is ever toying with economic ideas and relationships. Great novelists and poets have reported occasional abandonment by their muse. The well runs dry, permanently or on occasion. Mine has been a better luck. As I have written elsewhere, there is a vast inventory of topics and problems floating in the back of my mind. More perhaps than I shall ever have occasion to write up for publication. A result that I notice in statistical mechanics may someday help resolve a problem in finance.
Paul Samuelson
Mr. President, you are not leading this Nation-you're just managing the Government. You don't see the people enough any more. Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples. Don't talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good. Mr. President, we're in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears. If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow.
Bill Clinton
For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren't up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can't learn what they must know.
Robert A. Heinlein
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.... Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.... Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.... Nurses, garbage collectors, mechanics, it's obvious were they to vanish, results would be catastrophic.... A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble.... It's not clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.... Real productive workers are squeezed and exploited. The remainder are unemployed and a larger stratum paid to do nothing.
David Graeber
When [Born and Heisenberg and the Göttingen theoretical physicists] first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices. So they had gone to Hilbert for help and Hilbert said the only time he had ever had anything to do with matrices was when they came up as a sort of by-product of the eigenvalues of the boundary-value problem of a differential equation. So if you look for the differential equation which has these matrices you can probably do more with that. They had thought it was a goofy idea and that Hilbert didn't know what he was talking about. So he was having a lot of fun pointing out to them that they could have discovered Schrödinger's wave mechanics six month earlier if they had paid a little more attention to him.
Edward Condon
It took from a hundred to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years for the astronomy of Kepler to become the astronomy of Newton and Laplace], and for the mechanics of [[Galileo to become the mechanics of d'Alembert and Lagrange. On the other hand, less than a century has elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith's work and the contributions of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and myself.
Léon Walras
Unfortunately... the philosophy of Aristotle laid it down as a principle, that the celestial motions were regulated by laws proper to themselves, and bearing no affinity to those which prevail on earth. By thus drawing a broad and impassable line of separation between celestial and terrestrial mechanics, it placed the former altogether out of the pale of experimental research, while it at the same time impeded the progress of the latter by the assumption of principles respecting natural and unnatural motions, hastily adopted from the most superficial and cursory and remark, undeserving even the name of observation. Astronomy therefore continued for ages a science of mere record, in which theory had no part, except in so far as it attempted to conciliate the inequalities of the celestial motions with that assumed law of uniform circular revolution which was alone considered consistent with the perfection of the heavenly mechanism.
John Herschel
It has been generally believed that only the complex numbers could legitimately be used as the ground field in discussing quantum-mechanical operators. Over the complex field, Frobenius' theorem is of course not valid; the only division algebra over the complex field is formed by the complex numbers themselves. However, Frobenius' theorem is relevant precisely because the appropriate ground field for much of quantum mechanics is real rather than complex.
Freeman Dyson
Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies ... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929 ... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator.
Freeman Dyson
First and foremost, yoga made its contribution to my quest to understand consciously the mechanics of violin playing, a quest which by 1951 had long been one of the themes of my life. All influences pointed to less tension, more effective application of energy, the breaking down of resistance in every joint, the coordination of all motions into one motion; and illustrated the profound truth that strength comes not from strength but from the subtle comprehension of process, proportion and balance.
Yehudi Menuhin
Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.
Simone Weil
The first law is the same for both light and material bodies; they both move in a straight line, as long as they are not deflected by an outside force.
The second law is also the same as that governing the reflection of an elastic ball from an impenetrable surface. Mechanics shows that such a ball is reflected from such a surface so that its angle of reflection equals its angle of incidence, as observed for light.
But the third law still requires a plausible explanation. The passage of light from one medium to another exhibits behavior that is totally different from a ball moving through different media.
Pierre Louis Maupertuis
Einstein is the only figure in the physical sciences with a stature that can be compared with Newton. Newton is reported to have said "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." This remark is even more true of Einstein who stood on the shoulders of Newton. Both Newton and Einstein put forward a theory of mechanics and a theory of gravity but Einstein was able to base General Relativity on the mathematical theory of curved spaces that had been constructed by Riemann while Newton had to develop his own mathematical machinery. It is therefore appropriate to acclaim Newton as the greatest figure in mathematical physics and the Principia is his greatest achievement.
Stephen Hawking
![I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct. [T. F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves. ] Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude - I would paraphrase Goering-is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun. (Stephen Hawking)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/57/stephen-hawking-attitude-cat-459057.webp)
The last thirty years of Einstein's life were largely devoted to a search for a so-called unified field theory that would unify James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism with the general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation. Einstein's attempt was not successful, and with hindsight we can now see that it was misconceived. Not only did Einstein reject quantum mechanics; the scope of his effort was too narrow. ... Nevertheless Einstein's struggle is our struggle today. It is the search for a final theory.
Steven Weinberg
The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well.
Steven Weinberg
There's something I've been working on for more than a year - maybe it's just an old man's obsession, but I'm trying to find an approach to quantum mechanics that makes more sense than existing approaches. I've just finished editing the second edition of my book, Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, in which I think I strengthen the argument that none of the existing interpretations of quantum mechanics are entirely satisfactory.
Steven Weinberg
