Ben Miller Quotes

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

Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies.

What goes up must come down.

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

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.

Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

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.

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall.

We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.

The great weight of the ship may indeed prevent her from acquiring her greatest velocity; but when she has attained it, she will advance by her own intrinsic motion, without gaining any new degree of velocity, or lessening what she has acquired.

Whenever you say you're a physicist, there's a certain fraction of people who immediately go, 'Oh, I hated physics in high school.' That's because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.

I know all we're doing is travelling without moving. Speed freak faster than a speedin' bullet, slow down. If I don't, I might just lose it, locked up. You've got me honey, locked up under heavy brakin', yeah. You know I've got to hang on, drive too fast, I might be last.

A point of rest alone explains motion.

Momentum,' She repeats. 'You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

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

It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?

If you move something 10 pounds through space and then stop suddenly, there's a little overshoot. When you transfer weight from one leg to another, there's a certain way that it happens.

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.

Bowling is all physics and energy distribution. It's F = ma. So it is actually one of the most science-y sports, because it literally is just a ball and a surface and objects to knock down.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.

Anytime you hit a curve, or you hit on the side of the wall, you hit against the side of the sled. We're taking four to five, sometimes six or seven Gs on our body every time we go down the track. And then the crashing.

Momentum solves 80% of your problems.