Top 100 Physicist Quotes
#1. If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
Albert Einstein
#2. I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.
Bo Burnham
#5. A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.
Ernst Junger
#6. There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.
Rex Stout
#7. If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.
Peter Debye
#8. The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
Albert Einstein
#9. I've never heard a person say, 'I had a rotten mother, but she's such a great physicist.
Sonia Manzano
#10. Julian Assange is self-consciously an individual. He thinks in his own way, primarily as a physicist, having studied pure maths and physics at university in Australia where he grew up.
Nick Davies
#11. The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#12. When the time comes to change a paradigm
to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another
the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.
Leonard Shlain
#13. Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.
Frederick Soddy
#14. Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#15. The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.
Albert Einstein
#16. I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.
David Chalmers
#17. Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who'd just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.
Terry Pratchett
#18. the earliest battles flared between himself and fellow physicist Leonard Susskind over whether quantum mechanics implied that information could leak out of black holes.
David Kaiser
#19. The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
Richard Dawkins
#20. Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#21. To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.
Paul Davies
#22. A physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.
Bertrand Russell
#23. Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.
Orson Scott Card
#24. The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
Clifford Geertz
#25. A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.
Robert Bunsen
#26. I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
Alan Watts
#27. Sir William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, was an ingenious physicist and engineer, and he said that when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you can't measure it or express it numbers, your knowledge is lacking.
Michael Matthews
#28. I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.
Edward M. Lerner
#29. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.
Linus Pauling
#30. As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.
David Douglass
#31. The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves.
Erwin Schrodinger
#32. Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal
Frans De Waal
#33. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#34. A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
#36. I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer.
James Van Allen
#37. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Werner Heisenberg
#38. On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.
Simon Conway Morris
#39. The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.
Fritjof Capra
#40. Old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?
Walter Isaacson
#41. The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.
Pierre Duhem
#42. Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
W. H. Auden
#43. Smashing things up is a time-honoured particle-physicist method of finding out more about them.
Jon Butterworth
#44. I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
Michio Kaku
#45. It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.
Steven Weinberg
#46. When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
Ted Chiang
#48. For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.
Freeman Dyson
#49. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene Paul Wigner
#50. A seven-year-old cannot question the mathematical calculations of a world-class physicist. Yet we question how God is running the world. Does that make sense?
Timothy J. Keller
#51. No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.
William S. Burroughs
#52. I started out with the intention of studying physics. I was a terrible high school student outside of the fact that I did well in physics, but there's a big difference between being good at physics and being a physicist, so I jettisoned that very quickly.
Timothy Simons
#53. The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystic's consciousness - both physical and spiritual - in deep meditation.
Fritjof Capra
#54. Said to physicist John Bahcall. I don't believe in natural science.
Kurt Godel
#55. I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.
Nikita Khrushchev
#56. Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#57. Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.
Carl Linnaeus
#58. Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.
David Gross
#59. the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. (Of course, there would be no one left to observe it!)
Stephen Hawking
#60. Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.
Alan Arkin
#61. (A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.)
Sean Carroll
#62. There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.
Steven Weinberg
#63. Cal 's eyes reflected a weird combination of frenzy and fear as he twisted toward his father. My God!
She's on her way to becoming the most famous physicist in the country, and she's dumb as a post ! You are not having your baby in this house! You're having it at the county hospital!
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#64. It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
#65. The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.
Hilary Putnam
#66. Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of "I" in one word is too much.
Michael Faraday
#67. I studied engineering at MIT. There, the late, great physicist Philip Morrison introduced me to the idea that, in any system, there exists the inevitability that an event will occur which is completely unrelated to anything that preceded it. It completely changed my perception of "impossible."
Tohoru Masamune
#68. It is easy to time-travel, the physicist says - we do it every day. Travelling backward is the problem.
Rebecca Curtis
#69. For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes.
James Gleick
#71. I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.
Michio Kaku
#72. I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.
Albert Einstein
#73. The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn't make it any easier.
Miranda July
#74. Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.
Stephen Hawking
#75. The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.
John Cameron
#76. I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.
John Cameron
#77. Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.
Walther Bothe
#78. Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.
She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?"
"Alive," I say.
John Green
#79. How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!".
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#80. Mankind has moved away from the heart of the world to the logic of the mind, and their belief is in the chemist, the physicist, and the mathematician. Science has proven to them that all this ancient belief in ceremony is simply ignorance.
Drunvalo Melchizedek
#81. Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone - both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.
Richard P. Feynman
#82. The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.
Frank Wilczek
#83. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good - good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
Aldous Huxley
#84. I am a particle physicist, which is the nearest branch to nuclear physics. So in that sense I was the sort of right connection with the subject of nuclear energy and so on.
Abdus Salam
#85. The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.
Katie Hafner
#86. The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#87. Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist.
Guy Consolmagno
#88. What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.
William S. Burroughs
#89. A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.
Steven Weinberg
#90. My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.
Joan Baez
#91. Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.
James Gleick
#92. As former physicist Al Slawsky put it in the early 1990s, "It was a bad year for value investing. In my former life, there was never a 'bad year' for gravity.
Richard R. Lindsey
#93. The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.
Moby
#94. I'm neither professional fighter nor physicist, therefore on some level I will always consider myself a failure.
Dov Davidoff
#95. There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a hottest part implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
Richard Davisson
#96. I started out as a physicist; however, I am what I have become. I have evolved, with the help of many colleagues in the international scientific community, into an interdisciplinary scientist.
Alan J. Heeger
#97. As physicist Max Planck once observed, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.
Adam M. Grant
#98. Atticus:"Damn it, Jim, I'm a Druid not a Physicist!
Kevin Hearne
#99. There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.
Charles Fort
#100. When people on airplanes ask me what I do, I used to say I was a physicist, which ended the discussion. I once said I was a cosmologist, but they started asking me about makeup, and the title 'astronomer' gets confused with astrologer. Now I say I make maps.
Margaret Geller
