Theoretical Physics

Quotes & Thinkers in Theoretical Physics

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Albert Einstein

Science

1879–1955

"Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."

"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."

"Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."

"Web exhibit at the Austrian Central Library for Physics"

"Max Planck - Encyclopædia Britannica article"

"Topology and number theory are my faves."

"In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas — and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed."

"Roy J. Glauber at the Harvard Physics Department Faculty website"

4 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."

"Science is not religion. We're not going to be able to answer the "why" questions. But when you put together all of what we know about the universe, it fits together amazingly well."

"Each word is a singularity, or is connected with a singularity, in our way of understanding existence."

"Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them."

"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."

"Seventy-five years ago Erwin Schrödinger published... ... the key point... was whether life can be explained by physics. ...Schrödinger ...said "We must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing..."

"You need only a sheet of paper and so mathematics starts."

"In reality, experimenters are cussed individuals, eager to prove the theoreticians wrong whenever possible."

🇺🇸Martin David Kruskal

Mathematics

1925–2006

"Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways. … Using origami anyone can become a scientific experimenter with no fuss."

1 quotes

🇳🇱Martinus J. G. Veltman

Science

1931–2021

"Great physics does not automatically imply complicated mathematics!"

3 quotes

🇩🇪Sabine Hossenfelder

Science

b. 1976

"In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It's a guide, a reward, a motivation. It's also a systematic bias."

"Available energy is the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world."

"Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews."

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

"Ultimately, progress in applications is not deterministic, but opportunistic, exploiting for new applications whatever new science and technology happen to be coming along."

7 quotes

🇺🇸Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov

Science

1928–2017

"If they can in their proposals write the word Nano, the chances for funding increase."

"The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to."

"My methods are really methods of working and thinking; this is why they have crept in everywhere anonymously."

2 quotes

🇦🇱Laura Mersini-Houghton

"We do not aim at « mathematical rigour » of exposition, which in theoretical physics often amounts to self-deception."

"We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding."

30 quotes

🇺🇸E. C. George Sudarshan

Science

1931–2018

"Ideas are like bundles of trajectories undergoing complicated evolution."

"Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too."

"Max Born information at Nobel Winners site"

🇺🇸Paul Sophus Epstein

Science

1883–1966

"To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory."

"Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know."

3 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

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