Willard Boyle Quotes

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure.

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.

In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?

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

It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.

Bohr's influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth century physics.

The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."

Now I know what the atom looks like.

There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

For nearly a hundred years, we have known that the material world is an illusion. Everything that seems solid - a rock, a tree, your body - is actually 99.999% empty space.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."

Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.

It is a fascinating fact that father and son have given the most striking evidence for the apparently contradictory properties of the electron: the father proving its character as a particle, the son its character as a wave... Thomson was extremely proud of his son's success and tried to assimilate the new results into his old convictions.

Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

Modern physics has... revealed that every sub-atomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.

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

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers.