Physics

Physics is the science of the natural world, which deals with the fundamental particles the universe is made of, the interactions between them, and the interactions of objects composed of them (nuclei, atoms, molecules, etc).

Quotes

• Theoretical physicists live in a classical world, looking out into a quantum-mechanical world. The latter we describe only subjectively, in terms of procedures and results in our classical domain.
  • John Stewart Bell "Introduction to the hidden-variable question" (1971), included in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987), p. 29

• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
  • Niels Bohr, "The Unity of Human Knowledge" (October 1960)

• Physicists use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
  • William Henry Bragg; quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by Alan L. Mackay, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, 1994, p. 37 [1]
  • Variant: On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we teach the wave theory and on Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays the corpuscular theory.
  • Quoted in Physically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Physics and Astronomy by C.C. Gaither, 1997, ISBN 0750304707. [2]
  • unsourced variant: God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

• Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full...
  • Théophile de Donder as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• The supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world-picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or 'feeling one's way in'] is developed by experience.
  • Albert Einstein, Preface to Max Planck's Where is Science Going? (1933)

• How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
  • Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild (1931)

• The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."
  • Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964) Volume III, p. 18-9

• Physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching away in front of them. They are only just beginning to get under way.
  • James Jeans (1942) Physics and Philosophy, p. 217.

• "If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!'"
  • N. David Mermin, What's Wrong with this Pillow?, Physics Today, April 1989, page 9, doi:10.1063/1.2810963
  • Misattributed to Richard Feynman, by Matthew effect.
  • Attribution discussed in: Could Feynman Have Said This? by N. David Mermin, Physics Today, May 2004, page 10 (DOC)

• Our judge is not God or governments, but Nature.
  • Tejinder (Jim) Virdee, a spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid contained within the Large Hadron Collider
  • New York Times coverage of the Large Hadron Collider project: [3] (May 14, 2007)

See also

• Thermodynamics