Quotations

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, 1687, Laws of Motion I
The alternation of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.
Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, 1687, Laws of Motion II
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.
Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, 1687, Laws of Motion III
The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks, 1730
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton, Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, II, Ch. 27
Gott ist raffiniert, aber boshaft ist er nicht. (God is subtle but he is not malicious.)
Albert Einstein, Fine Hall, The Mathematical Institute of Princeton University
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.
Albert Einstein
The axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be abstracted from experience, but must be freely invented. ... Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it.
Albert Einstein
I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
Albert Einstein
The whole of science is nothing more than a reformulation of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein
I incline to the opinion that the wavefunction does not (completely) describe what is real, but only a to us empirically accessible maximal knowledge regarding that which really exists. (in a 1945 letter to a colleague)
Albert Einstein
Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it. [of quantum mechanics]
Niels Bohr
Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics.
P. A. M. Dirac
A physical theory must posses mathematical beauty.
P. A. M. Dirac, 1956
No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is a measured phenomenon.
John Wheeler
I don't mine your thinking slowly: I mind your publishing faster than you think.
Wolfgang Pauli
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its oponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg
Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
Werner Heisenberg
If all this damned quantum jumping were really to stay I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.
Erwin Schrödinger (to Niels Bohr in 1926)
In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.
Stephen Hawking, Brief History of Time
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
Lord Kelvin, 1900
Quantum mechanics, that mysterious, confusing discipline, which none of us really understands, but which we know how to use.
Muray Gell-Mann
This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.
Steven Weinberg
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.
Max Planck
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make far more sense then common sense does.
David Deutsch
I like relativity and quantum theories Because I don't understand them. And they make me feel as if space shifted About like a swan that can't settle, Refusing to sit still and be measured; And as if the atom were an impulsive thing Always changing its mind.
D. H. Lawrence (1928-1929)
Every experiment is like a weapon which must be used in its particular way - a spear to thrust, a club to strike. Experimenting requires a man who knows when to thrust and when to strike, each according to need and fashion.
Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery
Truth is great and its effectiveness endures.
Ptahhotpe
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but twilight of the dawn.
Herbert Georg Wells
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard Shaw
You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.
George Bernard Shaw
What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements: for of these are all things created.
Thomas a Kempis
By convention there is colour, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there atoms and space.
Democritus
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
To ask the hard question is simple.
Wystan Hugh Auden
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
Stephen D. Poe
"Amazing, Holmes." "Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary."
Arthur Conan Doyle
From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.
Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
When I hear you give your reasons, the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process.
Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Sherlock Holmes, A Case of Identity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is quite a three-pipe problem.
Sherlock Holmes, The Read-Headed League, Sir Arhur Conan Doyle

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