quotations about physics
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. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
NIELS BOHR
"The Unity of Human Knowledge", October 1960
Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full.
THEOPHILE DE DONDER
Autobiography
In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there.
LISA RANDALL
Discover Magazine, July 2006
The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them.
STEPHEN HAWKING
Black Holes and Baby Universes