Physicist Quotes

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”
― Richard Feynman

“I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”
― Paul A.M. Dirac

“The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen”
― Paul A.M. Dirac

“Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.”
― Eugene Paul Wigner

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays

“Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.”
― Hermann Weyl

“If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.”
― Albert Einstein

“I'm not anti-religion. I'm anti-maniac.”
― Brian Cox:

“Have you heard the joke about the chemist, physicist and economist who get wrecked on a desert isle, with a huge supply of canned baked beans as their only food? The chemist says that he can start a fire using the neighbouring palm trees, and calculate the temperature at which a can will explode. The physicist says that she can work out the trajectory of each of the baked beans, so that they can be collected and eaten. The economist says "Hang on guys, you're doing it the hard way. Let's assume we have a can opener.”
― Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?

“If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!”
― George Gamow

“If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was “false,” the best thing he could say is that it was “interesting.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as 'real' ... A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons, or an idea in the mind of God : each of these accounts of it may have its merits, but neither conforms at all closely to the suggestions of common sense. ... neither physicists nor philosophers have ever given any convincing account of what 'physical reality' is, or of how the physicist passes, from the confused mass of fact or sensation with which he starts, to the construction of the objects which he calls 'real'.

A mathematician, on the other hand, is working with his own mathematical reality. ... mathematical objects are so much more what they seem. ... 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

“There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne.”
― Steven Weinberg

“If a scientist does not understand a problem, he writes down many formulae, but as soon as he has understood it, there remain at most two.”
― Neils Bohr

“You sound like a physicist," she said.
"There's no need to be insulting.”
― Percival Everett, Dr. No

“By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.”
― John Ellis, Quantum Reflections

“The world is most consistent with purposeful creation.”
― Arno Penzias

“Light is so fast that nothing can move faster than its own shadow.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.”
― Sidney Coleman

“Ich weiss, dass ich nichts weiss, und kaum das.”
― Sir Karl Raimund Popper

“If the universe is an artificial simulation then the mathematics is its code and a physicist is a programmer.”
― Shubham Sanap

“Grind So Hard
That Future Generations would curse you every time they open their books.”
― Ravevx

“Math, Bio, Physics, Chem and Code, these five can make or break society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Numbers are the tongue of time and space.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee