"Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness."
Physics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. It is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
"Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush, Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush, Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all! —Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal lifts her changeful form, Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same."
"It has seemed to me for some years that among physicists there is almost a cult, although certainly not an organized one, which I please to call a cult of obscurity. The creed of the cult is that a member disgraces the profession if he ever writes, lectures or teaches intelligibly to anyone but his immediate colleagues in the profession."
"The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature—a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point [of our material world] differs from another solely in the properties of space itself; four-dimensional, seven- and more dimensional spaces; a space which for ever expands; a sequence of events which follows the laws of probability instead of the law of causation—or alternatively, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going outside of space and time—all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realisation in any sense which would properly be described as material."
"The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion."
"I had spent six years slugging my way through many dozens of physics textbooks that were carefully written with the best of pedagogical plans, but there was something missing. Physics is the most interesting subject in the world because it is about how the world works, and yet the textbooks had been thoroughly wrung of any connection with the real world. The fun was missing."
"And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe, The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber."