"We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption."
J. R. Oppenheimer
"Absence of evidence, is not the evidence of absence"
- Carl Sagan
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
- Stephen Hawking
"Physics is the most exact, logical, and comprehensive method of arranging the thoughts about the nature that exists."
- Albert Einstein
Theoretical physicists live in a classical world, looking out into a quantum-mechanical world. The latter we describe only subjectively, in terms of procedures and results in our classical domain.
- John Stewart Bell
Theoretical physicists live in a classical world, looking out into a quantum-mechanical world. The latter we describe only subjectively, in terms of procedures and results in our classical domain.
- John Stewart Bell
Workers used a long rod to push uranium slugs into the concrete loading face of the graphite reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s.
(from www.aps.org/apsnews/2025...)
The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
- Paul Dirac
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- Dick Feynman
π
In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
- Lord Kelvin
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
A classic word of warning before you start studying statistical mechanics.
From "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein.
βNot only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.β
- Werner Heisenberg
βThe beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.β
- Maryam Mirzakhani
The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
- Freeman Dyson
Hulk smashing Gammasphere.
Gammasphere was an array of 110 detectors used for many discoveries in nuclear physics in the early 2000s.
It is featured in movie The Hulk (2003) by Ang Lee, where it shoots gamma rays generating the titular green monster, that proceeds to smash the ball.
The array costed 20M$, the Movie 137M$.
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959.
(cr. Wikipedia)
SchrΓΆdinger equation βοΈ
iββΟ/βt = (-βΒ²/2m)βΒ²Ο + VΟ
SchrΓΆdingerβs equation βοΈ
Lise Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry 49 times (19 times for Chemistry and 30 times for Physics), but never won.
π· Meitner at the Vienna International airport photographed in 1953. Courtesy of Austrian National Library.
A Brief History of Physics
Education Secretary Linda McMahon piledived by Kane in WWE event, 2003
"People think of education as something they can finish."
- Isaac Asimov
