Famous quotes by Physicists

"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, Physicist

"So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"If the experience of science teaches anything, it's that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"I'm a very passionate believer in the unity of knowledge. There is one world of reality - one world of our experience that we're seeking to describe"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned, but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"However, as the Eastern churches have always maintained, through Christ, creation is intended eventually to share in the life of God, the life of divine nature"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on Earth; it applies to the whole universe"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"I was later to receive an excellent first two years' graduate education in the same university, and then again was able to pursue my studies in the U.S. on a fellowship from the aforementioned fund"

Chen Ning Yang, Physicist

"As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict"

Chen Ning Yang, Physicist

"I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated, and I shall continue to dedicate, my work"

Chen Ning Yang, Physicist

"Education, like neurosis, begins at home"

Milton R. Sapirstein, Physicist

"The plain fact is that there are no conclusions"

James Jeans, Physicist

"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties"

James Jeans, Physicist

"It is impossible for any woman to love her children twenty-four hours a day"

Milton R. Sapirstein, Physicist

"The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine"

James Jeans, Physicist

"The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses"

Ernst Mach, Physicist

"Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself"

Ernst Mach, Physicist

"Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view"

Ernst Mach, Physicist

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