Tomonaga Physics Quotes

I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics. ~ Vandana Shiva

Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form ... the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Smartass Disciple: Master, where will you go after your soul leaves your body?
Master of Stupidity: What makes you think a soul will go elsewhere physically? ~ Toba Beta

In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by a little. That doesn't mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious. ~ Albert Einstein

I'm fascinated with quantum physics. ~ Will.i.am

The body thinks it's real. That's the problem of modern physics. How to convince our minds that they're not our own. ~ Dominic Smith

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Ignored ... was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity ... they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system. ~ George Gilder

Can we survive technology? ~ John Von Neumann

I think nature's imagination Is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax ~ Richard Feynman

Much remains to be learned about stratospheric chemistry - and, in more general terms, about the physics and chemistry of the global atmosphere. ~ Mario J. Molina

The difference between theism and new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned. ~ Marilynne Robinson

String theorists have found special pairs of geometrical shapes for space that have completely different features when each is probed by unwrapped strings. They also have completely different features when each is probed by wrapped strings. But-and this is the punch line-when probed both ways, with wrapped and unwrapped strings, the shapes become indistinguishable. what the unwrapped strings see on one space, the wrapped strings see on the other, and vice versa, rendering identical the collective picture gleaned from the full physics of string theory. ~ Brian Greene

Perhaps the main basis for the claim that quantum mechanics is weird is the existence of what Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'. These effects are not only 'spooky' but are also absolutely impossible to achieve within the framework of classical physics. However, if the conception of the physical world is changed from one made out of tiny rock-like entities to a holistic global informational structure that represents tendencies to real events to occur, and in which the choice of which potentiality will be actualized in various places is in the hands of human agents, there is no spookiness about the occurring transfers of information. The postulated global informational structure called the quantum state of the universe is the 'spook' that does the job. But it does so in a completely specified and understandable way, and this renders it basically non-spooky. ~ Paul Davies

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work. ~ Bruno Heller

The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time - including life - and that doesn't mean it's special. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

Like the very quantum particles we study, we must be comfortable allowing our view of the world to exist in superposition. ~ Kevin Michel

The physics of motion provides one of the clearest examples of the counter-intuitive and unexpected nature of science. ~ Lewis Wolpert

It's as if we think the laws of physics are subject to debate and amendment and political contributions can sway the laws of physics. ~ Al Gore

Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices. ~ Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition. ~ David Gross

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear. ~ Brian Greene

There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe. ~ Martin Rees

It is easy to make out three areas where scientists will be concentrating their efforts in the coming decades. One is in physics, where leading theorists are striving, with the help of experimentalists, to devise a single mathematical theory that embraces all the basic phenomena of matter and energy. The other two are in biology. Biologists-and the rest of us too-would like to know how the brain works and how a single cell, the fertilized egg cell, develops into an entire organism ~ Dennis Flanagan

One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, ~ Thomas Jefferson

If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power--something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death. ~ Quentin Meillassoux

Hippocrates can be justifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic. ~ Philip Ball

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain. ~ Jon Favreau

While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today. ~ Victor J. Stenger

We are musical notes emanating from the quantum string section of a grand symphonic orchestra. ~ Kane Freeman

In physics, theories are made of math. We don't use math because we want to scare away those not familiar with differential geometry and graded Lie algebras; we use it because we are fools. Math keeps us honest - it prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can't lie. ~ Sabine Hossenfelder

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects. ~ Allan McLeod Cormack

Aristotle said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Galileo and Newton fixed things up. Then Einstein broke everything again. Now, we've basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time ~ Zach Weinersmith

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

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ~ Charles Wheelan

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level - consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed
physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or
two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system,
language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program - for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling - may likewise be described in only a few pages of
equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant
visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific d ~ Ray Kurzweil

He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. Butwe would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in physics because they are true in ethics. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When young Black boys learn that there are no limits to our possibilities on the basketball courts, we create the athletic genius of Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and in their genius, they recreate the game of basketball. When our young people know that there are no limits to their potential in the world of manufacturing, communication, physics, chemistry or the science of the human mind, then those same young Black minds who create dances on the dance floor or compose music on their bodies with the 'hand jive' will recreate these fields of human endeavor with the same incomparability. ~ Na'im Akbar

Galileo - the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science. ~ Albert Einstein

During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics I had learned. ~ Martin Ryle

[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

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects. ~ Leon M. Lederman

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is - Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Time and suffering are inseperable. In life, as in physics, both are the common denominator of all experiences. ~ Christopher Dutton

The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don't, Nature at once tells you you are wrong. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

If it weren't for physics and law enforcement, I'd be unstoppable. ~ Darynda Jones

On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about! ~ Richard P. Feynman