Physicist Quotes

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I started out as a physicist; however, I am what I have become. I have evolved, with the help of many colleagues in the international scientific community, into an interdisciplinary scientist. ~ Alan J. Heeger

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

Does the engineer ever predict the acceleration of a given body from a knowledge of its mass and of the forces acting upon it? Of course. Does the chemist ever measure the mass of an atom by measuring its acceleration in a given field of force? Yes. Does the physicist ever determine the strength of a field by measuring the acceleration of a known mass in that field? Certainly. Why then, should any one of these roles be singled out as the role of Newton's second law of motion? The fact is that it has a variety of roles. ~ Brian Ellis

Sir William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, was an ingenious physicist and engineer, and he said that when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you can't measure it or express it numbers, your knowledge is lacking. ~ Michael Matthews

Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here's a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand] [ ... ]. If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that's how you want to come at the problem ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

That's just how time travel looks like to the untrained eye. The reason why there aren't more travelers is that your average physicist refuses to be eaten by a giraffe in the name of science. ~ Bradley Sands

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. ~ Paul Dirac

Four years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own web page. I'm amazed at that. I meet kids all the time, been talking to my cat on the Internet. ~ William J. Clinton

The geometer offers to the physicist a whole set of maps from which to choose. One map, perhaps, will fit the facts better than others, and then the geometry which provides that particular map will be the geometry most important for applied mathematics. ~ G.H. Hardy

At a certain stage of our progressive attainment, every Initiate undergoes an "Illumination by Sound" in which the Music of the Spheres becomes to us a living reality. When the magical powers of sound are rediscovered and scientifically directed to the specific purpose of healing ... and when man has learned how to release the mantraic powers embodied in such inspired utterances, he will master the energies transcending even those unleashed by the atomic physicist of today. They will be energies of yet another and higher dimension. ~ Corinne Heline

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it. ~ Frederick Soddy

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

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. ~ James Gleick

Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive, physicists have never been able to come up with a comfortable picture of how it works. ~ Taner Edis

Atticus:"Damn it, Jim, I'm a Druid not a Physicist! ~ Kevin Hearne

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom. ~ Johannes Stark

All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society. ~ Michio Kaku

Negative energy may seem like the holy grail to a physicist building a starship, but for a nanotechnologist, the Casimir force is so strong at the atomic level that it becomes a nuisance. ~ Michio Kaku

For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes. ~ James Gleick

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. ~ Steven Weinberg

A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms. ~ George Wald

Intellectual men who quickly wolf down whatever nourishment is necessary for their bodies with a kind of disdain, may be very rational and have a noble intelligence, but they are not men of taste. ~ Charles-Augustin De Coulomb

Modern scientific culture has evolved from its roots in the ancient world and has become a complex web of many highly specialized disciplines. Gone are the days when one man, such as the seventeeth-century Robert Hooke, could be a groundbreaking inventor, microscopist, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist and even artist. Today the sheer enormity of available information has led to highly defined specialisms, and academics are expected to keep to their field - despite the truism that science has no experts. [...]

The gains from modern science are beyond counting. But the loss, arguably, is the synthesis of information generated by the many gentleman scholars that once existed, before becoming extinct somewhere around hte late nineteenth century. So few scholars now have a chance to view the bigger picture - to seek out patterns that might unexpectedly exist when apparently unrelated data is brought together. It has to be remembered that the difference between a major breakthrough and nothing at all can be just the angle of view rather than anything else. ~ Christopher Knight

One of the string theory pioneers, the Italian physicist Daniele Amati, characterized it as "part of the 21st century that fell by chance into the 20th century." Indeed, there is something about the very nature of the theory at present that points to the fact that we are witnessing the theory's baby steps. Recall the lesson learned from all the great ideas since Einstein's relativity-put the symmetry first. Symmetry originates the forces. The equivalence principle-the expectation that all observers, irrespective of their motions, would deduce the same laws-requires the existence of gravity. The gauge symmetries-the fact that the laws do not distinguish color, or electrons from neutrinos-dictate the existence of the messengers of the strong and electroweak forces. Yet supersymmetry is an output of string theory, a consequence of its structure rather than a source for its existence. What does this mean? Many string theorists believe that some underlying grander principle, which will necessitate the existence of string theory, is still to be found. If history is to repeat itself, then this principle may turn out to involve an all-encompassing and even more compelling symmetry, but at the moment no one has a clue what this principle might be. Since, however, we are only at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Amati's characterization may still turn out to be an astonishing prophecy. ~ Mario Livio

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

There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being. ~ Heinz Pagels

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers. ~ Diane Sawyer

The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space. ~ Steven Rose

Anderson's papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as "Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope," he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. With his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, an atmospheric physicist and climate change mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies - all while emissions ballooned - that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system. ~ Naomi Klein

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other. ~ George Johnson

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist. ~ Michio Kaku

Trinity's witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked. ~ Craig Nelson

Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.
She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?"
"Alive," I say. ~ John Green

The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds ... It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task. ~ Ernst Junger

The dog is very smart. He feels sorry for me because I receive so much mail; that's why he tries to bite the mailman. ~ Albert Einstein

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity. ~ Richard Dawkins

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. ~ Carl Sagan

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered. ~ David Chalmers

The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying ... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views. ~ Norbert Wiener

If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas. ~ Hugh Everett III

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. ~ Carl Sagan

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape. ~ W. H. Auden

I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true. ~ Ernest O. Lawrence

How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!". ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In Mahayana Buddhism the universe is therefore likened to a vast net of jewels, wherein the reflection from one jewel is contained in all jewels, and the reflections of all are contained in each. As the Buddhists put it, "All in one and one in all." This sounds very mystical and far-out, until you hear a modern physicist explain the present-day view of elementary particles: "This states, in ordinary language, that each particle consists of all the other particles, each of which is in the same way and at the same time all other particles together." Similarities ~ Ken Wilber

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise. ~ Katie Hafner

Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them. ~ Joseph Fourier

When I was young, Stephen Hawking wasn't the world's most famous physicist. The fame didn't arrive until the publication of "A Brief History of Time," by which time I was in my late teens. When I was a child, he was well known among physicists, but they are a fairly select, serious bunch, not much given to celebrity idolizing. ~ Stephen Hawking

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web ... Now even my cat has its own page. ~ William J. Clinton

An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. "How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all Scottish sheep are black!" To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!" The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black. ~ Simon Singh

Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, physics, which uses a form of logic - mathematics - as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of a bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact. ~ John M Barry

The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn't make it any easier. ~ Miranda July

I started out with the intention of studying physics. I was a terrible high school student outside of the fact that I did well in physics, but there's a big difference between being good at physics and being a physicist, so I jettisoned that very quickly. ~ Timothy Simons

Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. ~ Harold Lewis

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion. ~ James P. Hogan

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job. ~ John Cameron

Many people, improperly, lump together libertarians and the Tea Parties. That's really wrong. Many of the libertarians are physicists, and many of the Tea Party people don't bathe. There's really not much in common there! ~ Alan Grayson

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope. ~ Stephen Hawking

In an old joke, a physicist and a mathematician are asked what they would do if they needed to iron their pants, but although they are in possession of an iron, the electric outlet is in the adjacent room. Both answer that they would take the iron to the second room and plug it in there. Now they are asked what they would do if they were already in the room in which the outlet is located. They physicist answers that he would plug the iron into the outlet directly. The mathematician, on the other hand, says that he would take the iron to the room without the outlet, since that problem has already been solved. ~ Mario Livio

Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations. ~ Scott Adams

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

In a famous hoax, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a leading journal of cultural studies purporting to describe how quantum gravity could produce a "liberatory postmodern science." The article, which parodied the convoluted style of argument in the fashionable academic world of cultural studies, was promptly published by the editors. Sokal announced that his intention was to test the intellectual standards of the discipline by checking whether the journal would publish a piece "liberally salted with nonsense." Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," April 15, 1996, ~ Dani Rodrik

As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize. ~ Murray Gell-Mann

First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future. ~ Michio Kaku

Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world. ~ Clifford A. Pickover

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male. ~ Margaret Wertheim

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly. ~ Joan Baez

By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life. ~ John Ellis

Everything that humans can imagine is a possibility in reality. ~ Physicist Willy Karen

Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics. ~ Richard P. Feynman

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themsel ~ Aaron Freeman

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol.

{Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres} ~ Charles H. Bennett

The determination of the relationship and mutual dependence of the facts in particular cases must be the first goal of the Physicist; and for this purpose he requires that an exact measurement may be taken in an equally invariable manner anywhere in the world ... Also, the history of electricity yields a well-known truth-that the physicist shirking measurement only plays, different from children only in the nature of his game and the construction of his toys. ~ Franz Karl Achard

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago. ~ Steven Weinberg

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world. ~ Alain Aspect

...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. ~ Giles MacDonogh

Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human ... Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments. ~ Robert Rosenberg

Never memorize something that you can look up. ~ Albert Einstein

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Physics and Philosophy ~ Werner Heisenberg

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas. ~ Michio Kaku

An interesting question is whether symmetry with respect to translation, and indeed reflection and rotation too, is limited to the visual arts, or may be exhibited by other artistic forms, such as pieces of music. Evidently, if we refer to the sounds, rather than to the layout of the written musical score, we would have to define symmetry operations in terms other than purely geometrical, just as we did in the case of the palindromes. Once we do that, however, the answer to the question, Can we find translation-symmetric music? is a resounding yes. As Russian crystal physicist G. V. Wulff wrote in 1908: "The spirit of music is rhythm. It consists of the regular, periodic repetition of parts of the musical composition...the regular repetition of identical parts in the whole constitutes the essence of symmetry." Indeed, the recurring themes that are so common in musical composition are the temporal equivalents of Morris's designs and symmetry under translation. Even more generally, compositions are often based on a fundamental motif introduced at the beginning and then undergoing various metamorphoses. ~ Mario Livio

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning. ~ Edward Victor Appleton

I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, "Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?"

"Back in that room that we just came through."

"Oh!" I said in delight. "Then I'm gonna give a speech in that room!"

The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part.

We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, "This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions." They were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking.

I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. "Oh!" I said. "I know that guy!" and I started through the door.

The guide screamed, "No, no! Don't go in there!" By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn't chase me because he wasn't allowed to go through the door himself! ~ Richard P. Feynman

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think. ~ Bo Burnham

A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he said, surprised at the question, 'in honor of physics! ~ Annie Dillard

Physicists have yet to understand why the Higgs boson's mass is what it is. ~ Lisa Randall

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions. ~ Fritjof Capra

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today. ~ Sean Carroll

As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject. ~ David Douglass

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ~ Bill Gaede

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt

Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance. ~ Luther Burbank

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal. ~ Stanislaw Ulam