Quotes About Physicists

#1. CERN is a centre of scientific excellence and a source of pride and inspiration for physicists from all over the world, a cradle for technology and innovation, and a shining concrete example of scientific cooperation and peace.

Fabiola Gianotti

#2. Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

W.G. Sebald

#3. Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

Heinz Pagels

#4. In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#5. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

#6. Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? - RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

James Gleick

#7. Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this
partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Douglas Adams

#8. The mathematicians of this world regard themselves as 'physicists,' yet they know next to nothing about Physics.

Bill Gaede

#9. When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it's very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.

Tony Rothman

#10. By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

Edward Teller

#11. All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.

Richard Dawkins

#12. 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

#13. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

Erwin Schrodinger

#14. I have a tendency, more than most other physicists, to try to figure out everything all at once, before I publish. And even to try to figure out everything in my head, without pencil and paper.

Edward Witten

#15. Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical.

George Sarton

#16. When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists.

Ivar Giaever

#17. Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Brian Greene

#18. 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

#19. [T]he shaman treats all realities as subjective, much like some modern theoretical physicists are beginning to do. In such a viewpoint the question of whether an experience is real or not makes no sense, because the answer is yes and no, depending on your point of view.

Serge King

#20. Some physicists postulate that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and that we simply experience whatever present slice of the universe we happen to be in at the moment.

Ted Dekker

#21. There are now over 5,000 medical physicists in the U.S more than 50 times the number in 1958.

John Cameron

#22. 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

#23. The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.

John Updike

#24. Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream.

Shirley Jackson

#25. Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from future.

James Gleick

#26. Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

George Johnson

#27. I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

#28. Whatever the final laws of nature may be, there is no reason to suppose that they are designed to make physicists happy.

Steven Weinberg

#29. 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

#30. Most physicists like myself won't believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.

Lisa Randall

#31. Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.

Hendrik Tennekes

#32. Medical physicists work in cooperation with doctors. A few medical physicists devote their time to research and teaching. A few get involved with administrative duties.

John Cameron

#33. Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Terry Pratchett

#34. Rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for "connections" in nature than for causal laws (determinism).

M.L. Von Franz

#35. Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

Gian-Carlo Rota

#36. Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.

Dean Rusk

#37. Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#38. The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

Alain Aspect

#39. Writing does what physicists cannot: it freezes time; captures the essence of the moment, even as it passes away. Writing says, we were here; that we breathed and felt and saw and made mistakes and learned from them.

L. E. Henderson

#40. If the physicists seem to achieve their ends more successfully than the theologians, that is simply a reflection of how much easier science is than theology.

John Polkinghorne

#41. There were two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand there was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

Rudolf Ladenburg

#42. Our enemy is Al Qaeda and its allies, people who have publicly said they wish to attack the United States again, people who have publicly called on nuclear physicists and engineers to help them gain access to nuclear weapons, which, as the whole world knows, Pakistan has.

Richard Holbrooke

#43. It was my responsibility that this world got itself an atom bomb, because there were only a handful of nuclear physicists in the thirties - only a handful. And we were all beating the desk and saying How wonderful it will be if we discover atomic fission.

L. Ron Hubbard

#44. Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?

John Archibald Wheeler

#45. When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web ... Now even my cat has its own page.

William J. Clinton

#46. Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.

George Iles

#47. Very strange people, physicists, " he said as soon as they were outside again. "In my experience the ones who aren't actually dead are in some way very ill.

Douglas Adams

#48. Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

Terry Pratchett

#49. Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.

Richard P. Feynman

#50. The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

Edward Abbey

#51. We physicists, on the other hand, must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion - which is indeed made plain by induction.

Aristotle.

#52. The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour.

Victor J. Stenger

#53. Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that "elegance" - as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries - is a key to ultimate reality?

Rollo May

#54. Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

Stephen Hawking

#55. Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

Richard P. Feynman

#56. I found collaborating with congenial doctors about problems that physicists could help solve was very satisfying. I also like educating anybody who would listen!

John Cameron

#57. Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

Lawrence M. Krauss

#58. We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom.

Alfred Kastler

#59. 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

#60. Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

Luis Walter Alvarez

#61. If antimatter and matter make contact, both are destroyed
instantly. Physicists call the process 'annihilation.

Dan Brown

#62. Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.

Scott Adams

#63. The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.

Max Planck

#64. It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.

Steven Weinberg

#65. One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists' war, World War II was the physicists' war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians' war.

Philip J. Davis

#66. Very strange people, physicists - in my experience the ones who aren't dead are in some way very ill.

Douglas Adams

#67. Physicists abandoned their belief in a Newtonian, material universe because they had come to realize that the universe is not made of matter suspended in empty space but energy.

Bruce H. Lipton

#68. Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties. That's really wrong. Many of the libertarians are physicists, and many of the Tea Party people don't bathe. There's really not much in common there!

Alan Grayson

#69. His contributions touched almost every corner of the subject and have had a deep and abiding influence over the way that physicists think.

Anonymous

#70. You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we're trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles.

Edward Witten

#71. Interferometry, like surfing, is a search for the perfect wave. But physicists don't have to paddle around and wait.

Ken Goldberg

#72. Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

Werner Heisenberg

#73. With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.

Richard P. Feynman

#74. Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

Terry Pratchett

#75. I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.

Cynthia Breazeal

#76. Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

Jonathan Miller

#77. Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists ... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#78. The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

Barry Commoner

#79. He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers "are always on the outside making stupid remarks," he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.

James Gleick

#80. The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

#81. The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people's minds.

Martin Rees

#82. [Physicists] feel that the field of bacterial viruses is a fine playground for serious children who ask ambitious questions.

Max Delbruck

#83. Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

Margaret Wertheim

#84. conformed to the principle of least action, a foundation of physics that holds that light or any object moving between two points should follow the easiest path.3 Planck's paper not only contributed to the development of relativity theory; it also helped to legitimize it among other physicists.

Walter Isaacson

#85. Being cannot be one in form, though it may be in what it is made of. (Even some of the physicists hold it to be one in the latter way, though not in the former.) Man obviously differs from horse in form, and contraries from each other.

Aristotle.

#86. Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.

David J. C. MacKay

#87. Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion - nuclear fusion at close to room temperature - enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism.

Sam Kean

#88. Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#89. The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ...

Leon M. Lederman

#90. An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.

Steven Pinker

#91. 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

#92. The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a poiesis.

James P. Carse

#93. Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith ... For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.

Paul Dirac

#94. Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

David Christian

#95. Our relationships as experimentalists with theoretical physicists should be like those with a beautiful woman - we should accept with gratitude any favours she offers, but we should not expect too much nor believe all that is said.

Lev Artsimovich

#96. Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

Jeff Bezos

#97. Theoretical physicists live in a classical world, looking out into a quantum-mechanical world. The latter we describe only subjectively, in terms of procedures and results in our classical domain.

John Stewart Bell

#98. I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.

Robin Ince

#99. To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

James Gleick

#100. A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.

Richard Dawkins