Physics Mathematics Quotes

This "Hawking temperature" of a black hole and its "Hawking radiation" (as they came to be called) were truly radical - perhaps the most radical theoretical physics discovery in the second half of the twentieth century. They opened our eyes to profound connections between general relativity (black holes), thermodynamics (the physics of heat) and quantum physics (the creation of particles where before there were none). For example, they led Stephen to prove that a black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness. He deduced that the amount of entropy (the logarithm of the hole's amount of randomness) is proportional to the hole's surface area. His formula for the entropy is engraved on Stephen's memorial stone at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where he worked.
For the past forty-five years, Stephen and hundreds of other physicists have struggled to understand the precise nature of a black hole's randomness. It is a question that keeps on generating new insights about the marriage of quantum theory with general relativity - that is, about the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity. ~ Stephen Hawking

I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between. ~ George Polya

But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles. ~ Lee Smolin

Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Physics without mathematics is meaningless. ~ Edward Teller

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women. ~ Stephen Hawking

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental. ~ George E.P. Box

Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised ... Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein. ~ Lincoln Steffens

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher. ~ Franz Karl Achard

In the one real, time-drenched universe, everything has a particular history precisely because it is finite, and not part of an infinite array. Moreover, the cosmological use of the infinite serves to mask the failure of a physical theory taken beyond the boundaries of its proper domain of application. The most notable instance is the inference in contemporary cosmology of an infinite initial singularity from the field equations of general relativity. Finally, the admission of the mathematical infinite into natural science effaces the difference, which we emphasize, between nature and mathematics. Nature works in time, with which mathematics has trouble. Mathematics offers, among other things, the infinite, which nature abhors. ~ Lee Smolin

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with. ~ David Chalmers

In our civilization, there are permanent forms which are part of every epoch and every culture. They are not especially difficult to detect. A minimal knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and perhaps mathematics, brings to light certain patterns that make these subjects easier to understand. It is striking to see the extreme similarity between these scientific propositions and the forms that recur in all times, places and civilizations. ~ Philippe Starck

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money. ~ Steve Jobs

For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system. ~ Jules Michelet

After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known
no law of physics can account for desire. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

Of course, many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and that has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the street below. ~ Terry Pratchett

Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle. ~ Keith Devlin

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. ~ Paul Dirac

Classical physics has been superseded by quantum theory: quantum theory is verified by experiments. Experiments must be described in terms of classical physics. ~ Carl Friedrich Von Weizsacker

If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: 'Be comforted, you and they shall live again.' ~ Frank Tipler

[The ceremonial key to the city of Padua] is engraved with a quote from Galileo that is also on display at the physics department of the university...'I deem it of more value to find out a truth about however light a matter than to engage in long disputes about the greatest questions without achieving any truth. ~ Lisa Randall

The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science. ~ David Hilbert

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two? ~ Jeanette Winterson

Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950] ~ Hermann Weyl

Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible. ~ Niels Bohr

Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat. ~ David Bentley Hart

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In ~ Terryl L. Givens

Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies. ~ Jake Barton

As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. ~ Arthur Koestler

There are some parts I like about school. I like math a lot, and I like physics. ~ Morgan Saylor

Petyr had been talking about mathematics again, boring everyone, when her mother looked up from her plate with a smile and announced that Julie had written a letter to say she'd quit the family. Clarissa's mouth had dropped open. It was like saying that the sun had decided to become a politician or that four had decided to be eight. It wasn't quite incomprehensible, but it lived on the edge. ~ James S.A. Corey

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them. ~ Niels Bohr

Within mathematics, assertions must always be proven mathematically and expressed in a valid and scientifically correct formula. The mathematician must be able to stand on a podium and say the words 'This is so because … ~ Stieg Larsson

Once you realize the magic of life is inside you; its impossible not to see it outside as well. ~ Renae A. Sauter

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am. ~ Erma Bombeck

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. ~ James Gleick

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Mathematics is an obscure field, an abstruse science, complicated and exact; yet so many have attained perfection in it that we might conclude almost anyone who seriously applied himself would achieve a measure of success. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Mathematicians boast of their exacting achievements, but in reality they are absorbed in mental acrobatics and contribute nothing to society. ~ Ogyu Sorai

The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life, because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense complexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowadays people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or Pediculus, because these words are used only by people who use them in one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of a man's social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about the 'withering away of the State' may disclose a difference about the use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the policeman is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often slow to see the need for cr ~ Lancelot Hogben

I gave my change to him," says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall. "You know he'll only spend it on schnapps," Ove states. Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. "Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics! ~ Fredrik Backman

A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability ~ Robert Kanigel

Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself. ~ Arthur Eddington

Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ... ~ Isaac Asimov

Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions. ~ Stephen Hawking

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics. ~ Frank J. Tipler

At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics. ~ Mark Gatiss

My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn't make it work. ~ Peter Higgs

[The works of Archimedes] are without exception, monuments of mathematical exposition; the gradual revelation of the plan of attack, the masterly ordering of the propositions, the stern elimination of everything not immediately relevant to the purpose, the finish of the whole, are so impressive in their perfection as to create a feeling akin to awe in the mind of the reader. ~ Thomas Little Heath

What comes, is called. ~ Ki Longfellow

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical ... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines. ~ Morris Kline

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us. ~ Michio Kaku

Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion? ~ Oliver Heaviside

[Concerning] phosphorescent bodies, and in particular to uranium salts whose phosphorescence has a very brief duration. With the double sulfate of uranium and potassium ... I was able to perform the following experiment: One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion in two sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours. When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative. One can repeat the same experiments placing a thin pane of glass between the phosphorescent substance and the paper, which excludes the possibility of chemical action due to vapors which might emanate from the substance when heated by the sun's rays. One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salts.

[Although the sun is irrelevant, and he misinterprets the role of phosphorescence, he has discovered the effect of radioactivity.] ~ Henri Becquerel

Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments. ~ W.H. Newton-Smith

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics. ~ George Smoot