Famous quotes by Physicists

"Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, How could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?"

John Archibald Wheeler, Physicist

"Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves"

Werner Heisenberg, Physicist

"Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability"

Werner Heisenberg, Physicist

"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science"

Werner Heisenberg, Physicist

"What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Well, I don't like to get involved in these philosophical issues very much"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Yes, I was a parish priest for five years. I was a curate in a large working class parish in Bristol and the Vicar of a village in Kent"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Well, it's because I gladly acknowledge some ideas that are part of process theology, but which I think are not tied to all the details of process thought, and are very illuminating and helpful"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it, there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on Earth"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"The chaos can act as a magnifier of quantum fluctuations so that they can produce sizable effects in the world around us. But we know that that can happen often"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Our planet doesn't seem to be the result of anything very special"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"I do not keep up with the details of particle physics"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

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