Deborah Bull Quotes

I am a figure skater, which helps me appreciate Newton's theory of mechanics.

For relaxation, I like to figure skate. Being on the ice and spinning and jumping, I feel very close to nature. In particular, I feel very close to Newton's laws of motion. On the ice, you can experience Newton's laws of motion in their purest, most elegant form.

Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.

Newman's first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.

You have these great institutions spinning around you with great centrifugal force. You have to try to keep them spinning around the center.

Our annual school physics trip was always to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, as it's such a good example of Newtonian physics. You can learn about centrifugal force and Newton's first law from the roller coasters, and the Viking long boat is a giant pendulum. It's good for children to understand that science underpins all these brilliant things.

If you're in a helicopter, and you hover, why does the Earth not come to you if it's round?

Equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium and equal weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards the weight which is at the greater distance.

I shall now recall to mind that the motion of the heavenly bodies is circular, since the motion appropriate to a sphere is rotation in a circle.

Acceleration is finite, I think according to some laws of physics.

An object in motion tends to remain in motion along a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.

Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray.

The same thing is to be understood of all bodies, revolved in any orbits. They all endeavour to recede from the centres of their orbits, and were it not for the opposition of a contrary force which restrains them to and detains them in their orbits, which I therefore call Centripetal, would fly off in right lines with a uniform motion.

Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

Small samples in the centrifuge will spin at varying rates to create synthetic gravity, like the gravity of Mars or the gravity of the moon, and measure how the specimens respond within the centrifuge.

We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The earth, which by revolving and twisting round its axis with extreme velocity produces all the same results as would be produced if the earth were stationary and the heaven in motion...

A tree falls the way it leans.

It is indeed a law of politics as well as of physics, that a body in action must overcome a body at rest.

Why, if we're hurtling through space, why would water stay still? Why is it not wobbling?