Quotes About Theoretical Physics

#1. after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain - in terms of a few fundamental principles - why the world is the way it is.

Steven Weinberg

#2. Although I was really interested in physics, I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was really hard. I did theoretical physics.

Lenny Abrahamson

#3. I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

Max Born

#4. The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

Stephen Hawking

#5. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.

Alan Bradley

#6. Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

Chris Eigeman

#7. The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

Paul Dirac

#8. I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#9. Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.

Kate Atkinson

#10. The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment ... it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.

Paul Dirac

#11. I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Adam Pascal

#12. It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

Albert Einstein

#13. The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.

David Gross

#14. Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.

Richard P. Feynman

#15. Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.

Ian McEwan

#16. Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

Stephen Hawking

#17. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

Scarlett Thomas

#18. If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Pierre Duhem

#19. It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.

Stephen Hawking

#20. It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.

Robert B. Laughlin

#21. Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.

David Gross

#22. Until we have a firm understanding of the flow of time, or incontrovertible evidence that it is indeed an illusion, then we will not know who we are, or what part we are playing in the great cosmic drama." - Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics and cosmology

Nina Nenova

#23. My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.

Yuri Milner

#24. Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap - it is all in the mind.

Stephen Hawking

#25. It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

#26. Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.

Richard P. Feynman

#27. The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics.

Wolfgang Pauli

#28. All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics.

Ashim Shanker

#29. The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe.

Victor J. Stenger

#30. In 1955, I got my degree in electrical-mechanical engineering. I realised, however, that my interest was less in practical applications than in the understanding of the underlying theoretical structure, and I decided to learn physics.

Francois Englert

#31. Some segments of this book may be rough going. That's the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand.

Kip S. Thorne

#32. When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

James Rothman

#33. All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

Richard P. Feynman

#34. I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.

Lisa Randall

#35. ... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

Wolfgang Pauli

#36. 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

#37. Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.

Tsung-Dao Lee