physics quotes

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.

- Michael Crichton
  The Andromeda Strain.

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science† When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

-John Dewey
  Reconstruction in Philosophy.

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb.We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forcedby what? Bya system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

- Erich Fromm
  The Sane Society.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
'Minority Report'. Collected in Notebooks (1956).

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

- Ernest, Baron Rutherford of Nelson Rutherford
Quoted inJ B Birks Rutherford at Manchester (1962).