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).

Sourced

• 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)

• ...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

• 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.

• 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.
  • Physics and Philosophy (1942), p.217.

• Our judge is not God or governments, but Nature.
  • 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)

• "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)

• 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)

Unsourced

• All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
  • Sir Ernest Rutherford
  • Variant: In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

• Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
  • Stephen Hawking

• Guests at a cocktail party in the Southern Hemisphere tend to circulate in an anticlockwise direction.
  • Corollary to Parkinson's 2nd Law

• I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
  • Richard Feynman

• If [quantum theory] is correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science.
  • Albert Einstein

• My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
  • Stephen Hawking

• Nothing is more interesting to the true theorist than a fact which directly contradicts a theory generally accepted up to that time, for this is his particular work.
  • Max Planck

• Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
  • Richard Feynman

• The theory of quanta can be likened to medicine that cures the disease but kills the patient.
  • Hendrick Kramers

• Toast always lands buttered-side down, and a cat always lands feet first. I propose we strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches from the ground. With a giant buttered-toast/cat array, a hovering monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
  • John Frazee in the Journal of Irreproducible Results [4]

See also

• Thermodynamics