Paul Dirac Quotes

Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.

The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.

I want to study theoretical physics because it is one of the hardest things there is.

While the finish given to our picture of the world by the theory of relativity has already been absorbed into the general scientific consciousness, this has scarcely occurred to the same extent with those aspects of the general problem of knowledge which have been elucidated by the quantum theory.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

What lots of people have been trying to do ever since is find what's beyond the current Standard Model. So far, it has stood impervious to all attacks.

As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

The beauty of string theory is that it is all about mathematics. For that, you don't need resources or labs. Just sit in your room and do the maths.

We're going to be seeing things from regions in the universe where Einstein is the whole story. Newton you can forget about.

Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.

Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.

No one must think that Newton’s great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this [Theory of Relativity] or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.