physics

Quotes & Thinkers in physics

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🇺🇸Richard Feynman

Science

1918–1988

"He hated the fact that he participated in the invention of nuclear weapons, and he doubly hated the fact that he had so much fun doing it."

190 quotes

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

"Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards."

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

"Max Planck - Encyclopædia Britannica article"

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

"From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician."

"One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks."

"Because the universe was a cold, callous place. And they had just peered into the gulf separating the astronomically unlikely from the truly impossible."

"We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself."

"Everything is governed by one law. A human being is a microcosmos, i.e. the laws prevailing in the cosmos also operate in the minutest space of the human being."

"In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose."

"William Crookes : A Victorian Man of Science" by Cyril Norman Hinshelwood"

"John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson, Jacob Bernoulli, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews."

3 quotes

🇺🇸Nicolaas Bloembergen

Science

1920–2017

"Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility."

"I have also rendered the phonic molecular vibrations visible, when produced by the longitudinal oscillations of a column of air ..."

"Human civilization as we know it will end, sometime in the 21st century."

2 quotes

🇺🇸Charles Hard Townes

Science

1915–2015

"It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?"

"From my point of view, a completely covered woman has almost no chance of integrating herself in Germany."

🇬🇧Thomas Young (scientist)

Mathematics

1773–1829

"When I was a boy, I thought myself a man. Now that I am a man, I find myself a boy."

"It would be very unsatisfactory if the new way of looking at the time-concept, which permits a Lorentz transformation, were to be confined to a single part of Physics."

"In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor."

"A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means . It would be a means of universal suicide."

"Above all, we must be accurate, and it is an obligation which we intend to fulfil scrupulously."

"… mathematicians progress only by doubt, through humble and constant attempts to impinge on the immense domain of the unknown."

"We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from "real" work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science."

"The direct knowledge of matter that mankind can acquire is a knowledge of the average behaviour and relations of the crowd of molecules."

"There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history."

"It is widely believed that in our quantum world physical facts about occurrences in space time must be grounded in the wave function. There are several long recognized and much discussed difficulties with this view."

1 quotes