Theoretical Physicist

Quotes & Thinkers in Theoretical Physicist

77 thinkers1,085 quotes

"Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."

Stephen Hawking· b. 1942View quote →

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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."

"Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

"No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory."

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

"Topology and number theory are my faves."

"Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding."

"How do we get from symmetric laws to asymmetric appearances? ... Why are the fundamental laws symmetric? ..."

"Science doesn’t give authentically access to the Real in the ontological meaning of the word, but only to the links between phenomena."

"Gravity is not an option in string theory. It is a logical consequence of it!"

"I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity."

"Each second, some 1014 neutrinos made in the Sun and about a thousand neutrinos made by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere pass through your body."

3 quotes

🇯🇵Shin'ichirō Tomonaga

Science

1906–1979

"...a bride who is bullied by her mother-in-law will herself become a bad mother-in-law."

"Science is incapable of supplying answers to ultimate questions about why things exist and what their purpose is."

"It was clear that if I didn't spend the rest of my life concentrating on string theory, I would simply be missing my life's calling."

"God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself."

4 quotes

🇺🇸John Archibald Wheeler

Science

1911–2008

"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

"Besides their possible role in physics, the octonions are important because they tie together some algebraic structures that otherwise appear as isolated and inexplicable exceptions."

"Rudolf Clausius works in the Public Domain at Google Books"

"Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small Speck of Dirt."

"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."

"Mirror symmetry is concerned with counting the number of holomorphic curves on Calabi-Yau manifolds, i.e. compact Kähler manifolds X with trivial canonical bundle KX."

"In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything bad about the Soviet Union. At least this is how my grandfather used to remember me. Around 1981, I became a pro-capitalist person and it stuck."

"It’s about understanding! Understanding the world!"

"PBS documentary on strings, contains clip of award ceremony with Abdus Salam"

"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist."

"Perhaps the most important contribution to science that the Royal Society has made in its three centuries of existence is its early role in publishing Newton's masterful account of his discoveries."

"As I once told a newspaper reporter, in order to be sure to be quoted: discovery of supersymmetry would be more profound than life on Mars."

"Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony."

3 quotes

🇺🇸Philip Warren Anderson

Science

1923–2020

"“We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse”."

"On a double-log plot, my grandmother fits on a straight line."

"All scientists must communicate their work, for what is the point of learning new things about how the world works if you don't tell anyone about them?"

1 quotes

🇺🇸Sheldon Lee Glashow

Science

b. 1932

"The color gauge theory postulates the existence of eight massless particles, sometimes called gluons, that are the carriers of the strong force just as the photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force."

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"There is a prescription that works well, MOND, but the reason it works so well is not known. You may say that MOND tells us how the real theory of gravity should look."

6 quotes

🇺🇸Antony Garrett Lisi

Science

b. 1968

"I think that, without experimental checks, physics can — and has — gone off the rails ... experiment has to be the ultimate decider of what is good physics."

2 quotes

🇺🇸Josiah Willard Gibbs

Science

1839–1903

"Jolls, Kenneth R., and Daniel C. Coy, "Gibbs models". Iowa State University."

13 quotes

Notable Quotes

"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain", into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

— Richard Feynman, b. 1918View →

"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."

— Richard Feynman, b. 1918View →

"This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"

— Richard Feynman, b. 1918View →

"Just as science can live without certainty, religion can live without dogma, and the two can live together without conflict. This is the solution that Feynman recommends to his students."

— Richard Feynman, b. 1918View →

"An honest men, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

— Richard Feynman, b. 1918View →

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