Physics Quotes – Insight and Wisdom in Physics

"As an engineer of many years standing, I saw that this absurd allowance is only permitted in school books. No engineer would dream of allowing anything of the kind. I have projected many miles of railways and many more of canals and the allowance has not even been thought of, much less allowed for. This allowance for curvature means this - that it is 8” for the first mile of a canal, and increasing at the ratio by the square of the distance in miles; thus a small navigable canal for boats, say 30 miles long, will have, by the above rule an allowance for curvature of 600 feet. Think of that and then please credit engineers as not being quite such fools. Nothing of the sort is allowed. We no more think of allowing 600 feet for a line of 30 miles of railway or canal, than of wasting our time trying to square the circle"

W. Winckler

"Modern Astrophysics, Quantum Physics, and Astronomy are, in fact, simply repackaged occultism, and they have been passed off as modern science for many decades. This is known as Scientism. The entire Big Bang Myth is simply a Satanic lie which was necessaty in order to transmit other occult lies, such as The Myth of Gravity, Evolution, Heliocentrism, and eventually, give credence and traction to the idea of alien life. The primary occult ideology at the basis of all this is the idea of Cosmic Pantheism. The Big Bang Myth reinforces the idea that The Cosmos evolved from a pin prick of substance, and expanded out for billions of years, which is identical to the Kabbalistic occult teachings at the core of Pantheism."

Gregory Lessing Garrett

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."

Werner Heisenberg

"It's perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe. The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. A crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation—each in its own way tied to the big bang paradigm—is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid."

Bjørn Ekeberg

"If we consider that the advocates of the fixed and central position of the Earth can explain the heavenly phenomena as accurately, according to their own understanding, as we do, and that they additionally have the evidence of their senses, the Holy Scripture, and the facts on their side which we do not have, it is not without reason that they claim the superiority of their system. [...] However perfect our theoretical model may appear in our eyes, and however simple and satisfactory the Newtonian hypothesis may appear to us in explaining all celestial phenomena, here we must admit the astonishing truth that if our premises are challenged and our facts questioned, all of astronomy contains no proof of its own accuracy."

Dr. Robert Woodhouse

"Many have been able to see through the delusions of modern astronomy. Letters from various parts testify that, in some cases, men and women have begun to make use of their brain-power, which had been stunted and dwarfed by acceptation, without the slightest proof, of the unscientific, unreasonable, unnatural and infidel teachings of men foisted upon a credulous public in the name of ‘Science.’ Others again, tell that the writers have thrown to the moles and to the bats the world-wide and almost universally believed hoax that we are living on a whirling sea-earth globe, revolving faster than a cannonball travels, rushing through ‘space’ at a rate beyond human power to conceive, and flying – with the whole of the so-called ‘solar system’ – in another direction twenty times the speed of its rotation."

Thomas Winship

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Isaac Asimov

"For what I want to say here, knowledge of the book's content is not necessarily required, because it concerns easily understandable facts about the cause and nature of gravitation—the force that presses everything to the ground and is not easily harnessed permanently for propulsion purposes, the force that keeps all celestial bodies in their orbits and holds our entire universe together. How gravitation achieves the feat of creating the conditions for our earthly life remains unexplained by science to this day. Science only offers a series of competing model concepts here. Even the nature of gravitation is largely unknown to it. As Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) said at the time: "I have explained the celestial phenomena and the tides based on gravity, but I have not been able to derive the cause of the properties of gravity from the phenomena so far." Nothing has changed since then. One who must know because he struggled daily with the problem of overcoming it, the former deputy chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce aircraft engine works, A. V. Cleaver, summed it up as follows, I quote literally: "Gravity is truly a highly mysterious and elusive phenomenon. It seems questionable whether many people, even technically trained ones, realize how justified this claim is or whether they notice the conspiracy of silence with which gravity is treated in most physics textbooks. It is almost reminiscent of a Polynesian taboo or the Victorian attitude towards certain topics such as sex or particular organs and functions, which were deemed somewhat improper. The student learns that all bodies attract each other, that the stability of the universe is determined thereby, and the equations of Newton's laws describe their effects. Yet—unless he is a specialized graduate student of pure physics—he is still expected to accept the old idea of “action at a distance,” and it is quite unlikely that any of his teachers will draw his attention to our complete ignorance of the physical relationships between gravity and other phenomena, simply because we know nothing about it and because the academic world apparently prefers not to broadcast this fact!""

Otto Jung

"I confess that I cannot imagine how any human being, in his proper senses, can believe that the Sun is stationary when, with his own eyes, he sees it revolving around the heavens, nor how he can believe that the Earth, on which he stands, is whirling with the speed of lightning around the Sun, when he feels not the slightest motion."

David Wardlow Scott

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

Nikola Tesla

"“The [Theory of Relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.”"

Nikola Tesla

"While I was thinking of this problem in my student years, I came to know the strange result of Michelson’s experiment. Soon I came to the conclusion that our idea about the motion of the Earth with respect to the ether is incorrect, if we admit Michelson’s null result as a fact. This was the first path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment, though the Earth is revolving around the Sun."

Albert Einstein

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Albert Einstein

"We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton’s theory of gravity, and the difficulty increases with the number of bodies and the complexity of the theory. … We already know the laws that govern the behaviour of matter under all but the most extreme conditions. In particular, we know the basic laws that underlie all of chemistry and biology. Yet we have certainly not reduced these subjects to the status of solved problems…"

Stephen W. Hawking

"It is my firm conviction that the last seventy years of the twentieth century will go down in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics."

Carver Andress Mead

"It seems as though the natural sciences will never be able to lift the veil on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by faith in reason, the story ends like a bad dream: he has climbed the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak—and as he pulls himself over the final rocky ledge, he is greeted by a group of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Harald Lesch

"With all due respect, you can’t heat houses in winter with nuclear energy. And as if that blatant nonsense weren’t enough, she added: They shouldn’t assume we’re any more foolish than the average person."

Claudia Roth

"The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't."

Sam Harris