Isaac Newton Quotes

Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with.

People want to know about what's going on with what's in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. It's a lot of curiosity out there.

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely great.

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems .

Subatomic particles do not just sit around being subatomic particles. They are beehives of activity.

All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.

All kinds of physical considerations become senseless when we try to apply them to distances smaller than 10 -13 centimeter.

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

As a child, I was fascinated by any branch of physical or biological science. Even today, I find great excitement in discovering the complexity and variability of the world we live in, getting a glimpse into the deeper reality that we mostly ignore in our everyday human activities.

A neutrino comes into a detector, and most of the time, you don't see it. But very, very seldom, it will satisfy your curiosity and interact.

It's like there's a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us - from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of the planets - and most people are completely unaware of it. To me, that's a shame.

Entanglement can best be understood as this: When subatomic matter is in a process together, subsequently the subatomic particles go apart from each other and go across the universe. When they do this, they will remain entangled. That means if you do something to one, the other one responds immediately, instantaneously.

All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrodinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

The only way to look at men is like they're electrons. They have all these charges sticking out, and they're always looking for a hole where they can put those charges.

The more one chases the quanta, the better they hide themselves.

Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who’s boss.