6 Quotes Tagged: Physics

Things had been falling down since the beginning of time.

A human being born at one of Uranus's poles would be a middle-aged man at sunset and a very old man before it was time for a second sunrise.

Eventually, it had to be accepted that God had created invisible stars and this was the very first hint that perhaps the Universe had not been created with human welfare as its primary object (a point I have never seen stressed in histories of science)

It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.

"In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Robert_W__Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Robert W. Wood">Robert W. Wood</a> was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy — truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Wood">Wood</a> took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Wood">Wood</a> concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory."

60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel