#physic

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested? ↗

— Paul Davies

#reality #scientific-method #spacetime #time #time-passing

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science. ↗

— Werner Heisenberg

#cut #development #feeling #foundations #ground

What We want is to make it possible for our unfortunate people to live a life of industry for it is by steady work alone that we hope for our physical and moral rehabilitation. For this reason above all we have undertaken to rally our people around our ideal. ↗

— Theodor Herzl

#alone #around #hope #ideal #industry

From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary. ↗

— Victor Francis Hess

#appear #atomic #consideration #detailed #discovered

It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger. ↗

— Tom Holt

#beautiful #beautiful girl #dying #evening #girl

Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths. ↗

— Ellsworth Huntington

#america #approached #be different #because #climate

Physical courage is a great test. ↗

— Oriana Fallaci

#great #physical #physical courage #test

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment. ↗

— Barry Commoner

#cataclysmic #chemists #conceived #created #environment

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser. ↗

— Eric Allin Cornell

#days #experiments #few #involve #laser

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription. ↗

— Norman Cousins

#body #direction #experiences #gravitational #hidden