Physics Principles Quotes

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.

E=mc2. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared

Quantum physics is one of the hardest things to understand intuitively, because essentially the whole point is that our classical picture is wrong.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.

I've learnt more physics from Kabbalah than I ever did in school.

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics, a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant. A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. The Foundamental Law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin.

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

Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.

Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

So much of what we said sounded crazy, yet none of it was false... as if two theoretical physicists stood on stage to say that when we travel near lightspeed, we get younger than nontravellers; that a mile of space next to the sun is differnt than a mile of space next to the earth because the sun-mile space is curved more than the the earth-mile. Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

They're hitting harder now more than ever. The only person who would argue that is someone who has never had a physics class. They're faster and stronger, so the reality is the collisions have to be bigger.

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.

Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't.

Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

Relativity. Gravity. Quantum. Electrodynamics. Evolution. Each of these theories is true, whether or not you believe in them.

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

In the Marvel universe, vibranium has always been this material that absorbs kinetic energy. And any tiny bit of physics knowledge will tell you that that's really non-Newtonian. You can't just absorb energy, you've gotta change it into something else.