Oliver Joseph Lodge Quotes

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

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

...from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing.

There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics.

Unfortunately, a lot of economists wanted to make their subject a science. So the more what you do resembles physics or chemistry, the more credible you become.

People always talk about the implication and applications of a process, but for me, the goal is purely about knowledge. Knowledge can become practical today, in 20 years, or in 500 years. Ask Newton. He didn't know there would be space research based on his accident with the apple.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

Physics is not a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

Everything is physics and math.

Doing physics is a lot of fun if you like it.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

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.

We all know we fall. Newton's discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.

That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.