My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.
A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.
When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.
I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.
We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.
Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.
The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.