Physics Quotes

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch!

Felix Alba-Juez

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

Primo Levi

Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

Stephen Hawking

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

Bill Bryson

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, not reality.

Ken Wilber

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

John Twelve Hawks

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

Stephen Hawking

Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.

Richard Rhodes

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.

Albert A. Bartlett

Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it.

Felix Alba-Juez

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

Rivka Galchen

For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).

Bill Bryson

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

Richard P. Feynman

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

Leonard Susskind

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 description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

Niels Bohr

If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.

J. Richard Gott III

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

Michio Kaku

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

David Eagleman