Quotes on Physicist

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.

Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.

If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities.

Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not.

When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.

It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.

Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment.

Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?

Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.