Best Physics Quotes

"Lifting heavier at a faster rate is key to improving strength, as force is mass times acceleration."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems elusive. Laws of physics determine the future."

"We are a collection of particles governed by laws that you can write down and fit on a t-shirt, and those laws don't at any point in the evolution of the particles say, 'Hey, can you tell me now what to do, person?'"

"There are only two subjects really worth studying, physics and neuroscience."

Demis Hassabis

"I'm just thankful we have games like Tear Down and Control... that push physics and... can be an interesting gameplay feature."

"The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded essentially for making physics sense out of chaos."

"Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. The stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

"Einstein tells us that particles cannot be accelerated past the speed of light since that would require infinite energy, thus placing an apparent speed limit on communication."

"The speed of light isn't just the speed of a photon. No, it truly represents the speed of causality."

"Conscious experiences... are fundamental in some sense, so they're not derived from physics, they're not functional properties of particles, they are sui generis; they exist."

"It's a surprise that if you let go of space-time, things become simple."

"The amplitahedron captures the structure of space-time, Einstein's special relativity, Quantum theory, and a so-called unitarity of quantum theory."

"Our best science tells us that space-time is not fundamental. This is the conclusion of both physics and evolution by natural selection."

"The physicists are talking about when they thought that space and time are fundamental, they were thinking that this was the fundamental ground of all possible realities."

"The Holy Grail of physics involves the unification of the four fundamental forces, which includes finding a missing link between electromagnetism and gravity."

"Physics has sadly not produced any forward progress over the last 50 years."

"You have rotation, you have high altitudes, you have propulsion... and oh by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of earth's gravity."

"The effect of gravity on a vertical light beam: don't ask that question, as Einstein asked, what's the effect of a light beam, let's say shot vertically upward from the floor when it's detected at the ceiling."

"A light ray near the surface of the Earth, when it's fired downward, this has been tested in a big high tower: laser beam downward, detector at the bottom, the color of the light ray is a little bit bluer than it would have been if it would have been detected up at the top of its arc."

"The entire place is like a dancing set of little particle pixels, just dancing vibrations which make up the fabric of what we call the material world or reality itself."

"The faster you go to the speed of light, the slower time moves."

"Space has truly earned its moniker as the final frontier, stretching in all directions with rules of gravity and physics that do not apply on Earth."

"Lorentz transformations and the special theory of relativity is the theory of transformations which preserve the form of the metric."

"Racing is a fascinating intersection of emotionless physics and extremely charged feelings."

"Gravitational waves, like ripples on a pond, are created whenever something with mass accelerates."

"We work on a physics-based and physics is the same across the globe."

"Well, there's kind of a conventional understanding of the subject that they're two quite different things, so that mathematics is about making rigorous statements about these abstract things, things of mathematics, and proving them rigorously, and physics is about doing experiments and testing various models."

"I believe we want to look for a unified picture of physics in which the universe basically is a small place and as simple as it could possibly be given the laws of physics."

"The law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed... Everything that's here has always been here."

"Space itself is very stiff, so when gravitational waves come through it, luckily for us, it doesn't distort it so much that it affects our ordinary life very much."

"We use [the curvature of space-time] every day. Every time [the GPS] tells you where you are, if you did that with the satellites and you didn't use Einstein's equations, you won't get the right answer."

"The eternal inflation theory... I think if correctly understood, it would be infinite in both directions."

"I think it's a freight train on the tracks and then they just stopped it and then all the carts flew up in the air from the inertia and just scattered all over."

"When light goes from a rarer to a denser medium, it bends towards the normal."

"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear; this is a feature of convex mirrors."

"Energy is conserved. That's the main idea behind the first law of thermodynamics."

"Heat naturally flows from hot to cold. It's a spontaneous process."

"For most natural processes, the entropy tends to increase with the disorder."

"Refrigerators and air conditioners work in the opposite direction compared to a heat engine."

"The natural processes tend to lead towards disorder, and that's another idea of the second law of thermodynamics."

"Consciousness, if it's real, it's a physical thing. It has physical consequences."

"I'm about to touch a one-kilogram sphere of silicon 28 atoms."

"The second law of thermodynamics: Entropy tends to increase in closed systems; it doesn't go down."

"Electricity will always take the path of least resistance."

"We had developed what is called now the standard model of elementary particles; it's a theory that works."

"This discovery...is transforming our understanding of the universe with a fresh narrative of the physics of stars in their death throes."

"We finally now know what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and the answer is a kilonova."

"Quantum entanglement is the weirdest aspect of quantum mechanics because it even Einstein didn't like it, he called it spooky action at a distance."

"Trans Newtonian elements, for their seeming ability to break standard laws of physics."

"There's both a frontier of moving beyond everyday physics and another frontier of how these ingredients come together to form everyday physics."

"Gravity is dumb... it pulls things together... It's incredibly simple."

"A black hole is a mirror, and the way it's a mirror is if light, a photon, bounces off your face towards the black hole, it'll swing around the back and come back to you, and you see yourself from the photon that went around the back of the black hole."

"According to Einstein's theory of relativity, there is an absolute speed limit in the universe: the speed of light."

"The best discoveries in physics seem completely obvious in retrospect."

"Anybody can learn physics with the right instruction. It's very democratic!"

"Maths is basically the language of the universe, which means it's the language of physics."

"We apparently live in a kind of Goldilocks universe where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths."

"Physics is the closest we get responsibly to asking, 'Why are we here? What is it that we're made of?' It is the thing that would best substitute for a religion if you were able to understand what it was."

"This talk really is my ode to physics, my love affair with the subject that I have spent most of my life working on."

"Physics, for me, is the only real way of getting to the ultimate truth about the nature of reality."

"The holy grail of physics is to find this theory of everything, an equation that you can stick on a t-shirt."

"Gravity pulls things together here on Earth. If you jump out the window, with very high confidence, you will fall down, you will not fall up under the force of gravity."

"The laws of physics don't play dice, at least not in the standard sense."

"What a wonderful idea, that the way you unify the laws of physics is by stepping beyond the dimensions that we know about."

"Einstein's general theory of relativity is this idea that space can be curved."

"The presence of mass and energy causes curvature in space."

"One can quite easily derive E equals MC squared from this."

"Physics is the way our particular universe works, and I got kind of interested in the question of how could any possible universe work."

"It's conceivable that our physical universe could be the result of just running some extremely simple rule a gazillion times."

"Time is sort of the progressive doing of computation, the progressive changing of the world by virtue of the application of rules."

"I think that the thinking that he did in relativity, particularly, was right. It's very appealing, it's very useful."

"Matter itself is a form of energy, according to the most famous equation of all time, Einstein's E = mc^2."

"Physics is not about remembering equations; it's about concepts."

"Everything you see is happening milliseconds after it actually happens because of the amount of time it takes for light to travel."

"The most surprising idea to me is that we can actually do physics."

"Maxwell's equations completely changed our way of looking at the world."

"I used to build bridges in high school from like toothpicks... out of the pure joy of physics making some structure really strong."

"String theory is a theory of quantum gravity that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity."

"Minkowski showed that the space of special relativity is really four dimensional and it's this kind of geometry in which you can have distances which is zero although the points are a sort of long way away from each other."

"The experience of the passage of time slows down as you travel faster, and if you actually travel at the speed of light, that experience would be zero."

"Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge and knowledge creation."

"Mathematics describes the fundamental equations of the world. Within this mathematics, we have a description of Einstein's general theory of relativity, the standard model of particle physics."

"It pays to keep an open mind since we don't know which of the ideas in physics may be brought back decades later and solve the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics."

"Beauty is a requirement for principles of physics; beauty is fundamental in the universe."

"The beginning of everything in Einstein's theories was the idea that the speed of light is the same for everybody."

"Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is." - Richard Feynman

"This is arguably the most important equation in all of physics."

"Every particle in the universe is a tiny quantum mechanical ripple of the underlying relativistic field."

"The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level." - Wolfgang Pauli

"It expresses the fundamental limit on the knowability of our universe."

"The uncertainty principle is most often expressed in terms of position and momentum."

"The uncertainty principle is a statement about how much information we are ever able to extract from a quantum system."

"Basic physics tells us that nothing disappears; all matter turns into energy, and energy can be converted back into matter."

"Imagine that you were in a swimming pool full of molasses. If you tried to move in any direction, you would immediately feel a force that was opposing your motion."

"Motion is relative, not absolute... the speed of light is absolute."

"Space by itself and Time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of Union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

"Gravity is not a conventional force... it is a feature of space-time itself."

"Gravity reflects the curvature of space-time."

"Many of us still want it to also give us a deeper understanding of physics and of the universe."

"It is physically impossible for locality and realism to happen at the same time."

"Precision measurement provides us with a window with discovery potential for new physics."

"If you want to throw a ball as far as possible--people who play baseball know that--you should do it at 45 degrees."

"By spinning objects in proportion to the ratio, you can use the energy of approaching infinity for various purposes."

"Friends and colleagues, I'm delighted to be here talking to you, giving you a very brief tour on gravity."

"The electromagnetic field is as real as a rhino."

"Universality of gravity... a hammer and feather without air resistance should fall at the same rate."

"The very small is a small fraction of a proton and the very large is the universe itself."

"I love physics; I don't know what it is, I think the act of solving problems and getting an answer is so satisfying."

"Everything is energy. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. It's not philosophy; it's physics."

"Hermitian matrices are the quantum version of observables."

"Mathematical formulas in physics describing reality but there's a whole mathematical formalism associated with making inferences in the presence of incomplete information."

"Science says that if you throw this object at this angle and with this initial velocity, according to this equation, it will land on this precise spot at this precise time."

"Surface tension is actually occurring because of the interaction and interplay between the water layer and the air layer."

"Anything made of molecules, i.e., anything that moves, has a frequency, and all frequencies seek harmony."

"Entanglement is something that Einstein really didn't like, he referred to it famously as spooky action at a distance."

"Newton probably thought there was something missing from his theory, though, because he wasn't completely satisfied with it."

"Gravity is not a force between two objects with mass; instead, gravity is the warping of space and time in the presence of objects with mass."

"Einstein believed smaller objects are not pulled on by more massive objects, but instead, the objects are being pushed down by the space above them."

"Matter warps not only the fabric of space but time as well."

"The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world that's very precise and very full."

"The dominant theme in modern fundamental physics is symmetry."

"Nothing happens until something moves." - Albert Einstein

"Consciousness may not be localized to our bodies, but may be a fundamental feature of the physical world in which we live."

"The universe is not slowing down... the universe accelerates."

"If we do succeed in reconciling these opposites, that will be the crowning achievement of physics."

"Life violates the second law of physics...using energy to deliberately counteract the growth of entropy and to build ordered structures."

"Are the laws of the universe Lorenz invariant? We assume that they are, but could that be the most preposterous assumption?"

"Probably if you did a survey of physicists today, the thing that they would say they want to know the most is how general relativity and quantum physics can be merged together into one self-consistent theory."

"But as time has gone on that attitude has changed quite a bit. Most physicists today I would say go into these questions with a lot more humility."

"The muon g minus two result from this year was so interesting. It could be a sign of something new, a new force we don't yet know."

"Almost all but one in a billion quarks annihilated away because of exactly a process like this."

"We live in one world; its basic structure is that of physical particles... among the physical features of the world is consciousness."

"Physicists are drawn by aesthetics to some degree."

"The mismatch of a factor of 10 to the 120 between the observed amount of dark energy and our attempts to calculate that number is perhaps the greatest mismatch in the history of physics."

"Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness."

"If you don't know Sir Roger Penrose as a physicist, you might know him as a writer of popular-level books."

"What is going on in our brains which is making us conscious is going beyond current physics."

"Physicists could be just as moronic as anybody else. As a matter of fact, I've met quite a few physicists who, short of whatever they know in physics, they're fully lobotomized."

"Quantum mechanics is so radical, so different, it's such a big break from the previous way of doing physics."

"Light and heat are manifested by vibrations of a far lower intensity than those of thought, for the difference is solely in the rate of vibration."

"Energy is never destroyed; it can only change forms."

"The most basic law of physics states nothing can be created from nothing."

"The classical world, the branches of the wave function, are emergent."

"Space and time are not what our Common Sense tells us it is."

"Sean Carroll is the Bob Ross of theoretical physics."

"This is a world where the speed of light is something you have to factor into the equations you make."

"Energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be transferred."

"Anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics can be solved."

"Hawking found that when you include quantum effects, black holes can actually radiate away particles from their edge."

"Information regarding whatever object falls into a black hole is not lost because that information gets stored holographically outside the black hole itself."

"If there's entanglement, then there must be wormholes connecting the regions that are entangled."

"The entanglement between the exterior and the interior is not broken; it just reappears as the entanglement between the exterior of the black hole and the Hawking radiation."

"In Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity can actually be repulsive."

"The basic rule of physics is nothing really ever gets lost; information never gets lost."

"The surface of the black hole, the horizon of the black hole, is functioning as a kind of hologram."

"The information was not destroyed; it was carried off by the evaporation products."

"A century of discoveries in physics reveals a strange, counterintuitive microworld of atoms and tiny particles that challenges our intuitive understanding of the world around us."

"Entanglement and wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, had everything to do with each other."

"Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy, this is physics." - Albert Einstein

"Physics is not done. We're still not there. There's still a lot to learn."

"We can put all this physics together and we can chart out what we think of as the history of the universe."

"Space and time may not be fundamental structures; they may emerge from more basic ingredients."

"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience."

"We have this one theory that is called quantum field theory...it's so fantastically good that it just like it's wonderful."

"If anything can break the impasses in physics, it's conflicts of principle. When conflicts of principle arise, that's when major new paradigms emerge. That's the excitement."

"No room can ever have as much information as is implicit in [the universe]. The most accurate description we can ever have is in terms of a number of degrees of freedom which is proportional to the area and not the volume."

"Gravity is...a consequence of the curvature of SpaceTime."

"Entanglement...is the feature of quantum mechanics that distinguishes it from a classical worldview."

"Good physicists are as variable as snowflakes; every single one of them is different."

"Opposites attract in physics, so when you rub a balloon against your hair, it causes your hair to stick to it."

"According to modern physics, the world is made of quantum fields."

"Right now, quantum field theory is the best way we have of describing nature at its deepest level."

"We might somehow understand the fundamental structure of space itself."

"In quantum mechanics, an electron can be both here and there at the same time."

"Quantum mechanics is the most spectacularly successful theory that physicists have ever devised."

"There's an infinite number of degrees of freedom in any one region of space."

"Gravity doesn't fit into quantum field theory."

"Locality determines how the laws of physics work."

"Gravity is the warping of time, gravity is manifested by the fact that clocks at different distances from a gravitational source will tick off time at different rates."

"Hawking radiation is this idea that when a particle anti-particle pair forms, one member might get sucked into the black hole while the other rushes out into space."

"Quantum mechanics is an intrinsically awesome thing to talk about."

"The world is made of atoms. This reductionist view may apply to space and time themselves, possibly understanding the 'atoms' of space-time."

"The holographic principle: information is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional."

"Space-time has always been about digging towards the deepest layers of reality."

"Everything is quantum mechanical; quantum mechanics is the theory of physics that describes things at their most fundamental level."

"There's a huge puzzle why it was gravity in this very low entropy state, very highly organized state, everything else was all random."

"Gravity might emerge from properties of space and time when properly understood."

"Time travel to the future is within the laws of physics, and time travel to the past is likely not."

"Geometric quantization... said that Hamiltonian structures are actually predictive of a quantum theory."

"Physics is to be regarded not as the study of something a priori given, but rather as a development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience."

"Can we fully understand the bedrock laws of physics? And there is no bedrock more firm than quantum mechanics."

"Imagine, if you will, that you have a very powerful laser pointer. On a clear night, you point it to the moon. In a little over a second, you'll see the dot made by your laser on the surface of the moon, presuming the light is powerful enough and tight enough to make a dot."

"The dot is propagating faster than light, but it's a different set of photons that are raining down as the dot moves. The photons are coming from your laser pointer on Earth to the moon at the speed of light, but this is perpendicular to the direction of movement of the dot."

"The maximum speed limit is really not a limit with which things can move, because the dot is arguably a thing that can move faster than light. But the speed limit is a limit on the speed of communication; it is a limit on causality."

"Einstein's theory of special relativity, published in 1905, is based on two postulates. The first postulate is that all reference frames are equal regarding the laws of physics."

"The speed of light in a vacuum is constant and it is independent of the relative motion of that source of light. This was the postulate that changed our paradigm and the world of physics."

"Objects and observers in relative motion measure time differently. Movement in space affects how time is measured. There's no absolute time; there is no absolute now."

"Information can't travel faster than light. This is the part that you're not going to like because, as a Star Trek and Star Wars fan, I absorb what I'm about to say right now: since objects contain information, they cannot travel faster than light based on the laws of physics as we understand them today."

"The speed of light, a constant 299,792 kilometers per second, is the universe's speed limit according to Einstein's theory of relativity."

"The most puzzling element of entanglement, that, you know, somehow two points in space can communicate, becomes less of a problem, because space itself has disappeared."