Quotes about Physics

The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

Up to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were "elementary" particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles.

It also meant that whenever a body is not acted on by any force, it will keep on moving in a straight line at the same speed.

In 1956 two American physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, suggested that the weak force does not in fact obey the symmetry P.

It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.

In fact, according to quantum physics, each particle has some probability of being found anywhere in the universe.

All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin ½, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles.