Albert Einstein Quotes

Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.

Textbook science is beautiful! Textbook science is comprehensible, unlike mere fascinating words that can never be truly beautiful. Elementary science textbooks describe simple theories, and simplicity is the core of scientific beauty. Fascinating words have no power, nor yet any meaning, without the math.

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.

Everything doesn't work for everybody.

As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

A lot of my theories were not applicable as a closer

A theory is the more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability.

Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.

There is repetition everywhere, and nothing is found only once in the world.

The usefullest truths are plainest; and while we keep to them, our differences cannot rise high.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference.

Genius does not need a special language; it uses newly whatever tongue it finds.

Is uniformitarianism necessary?

What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.

The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?