"Modern theoretical physics […] has put our thinking about the essence of matter in a different context. It has taken our gaze from the visible-the particles-to the underlying entity, the field. The presence of matter is merely a disturbance of the perfect state of the field at that place; something accidental, one could almost say, merely a ‘blemish’. Accordingly, there are no simple laws describing the forces between elementary particles […] Order and symmetry must be sought in the underlying field." (Walter Thirring "Urbausteine der Materie", 1960)
"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of
something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering
and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for
such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and
therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in
ordinary human language." (Niels Bohr, "The Unity of Human Knowledge",
1960)
"The enormous usefulness of mathematics in natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," 1960)
"Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulas, are the beginning of every physical theory." (Leopold Infeld, "The Evolution of Physics", 1961)
"Physics does not endeavour to explain nature. In fact, the great success of physics is due to a restriction of its objectives: it only endeavours to explain the regularities in the behavior of objects." (Eugene P Wigner, "Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles", [Nobel Lecture], 1963)
"We have ceased to expect from physics an explanation of all events, even of the gross structure of the universe, and we aim only at the discovery of the laws of nature, that is the regularities, of the events."
"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, Never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, They invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves in universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)
"In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modem physics has found that certain things can never be ‘known’ with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities." (Richard P Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", 1964)
"A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses." (Harvey Brooks, "Scientific Concepts and Cultural Change", 1965)
"Pedantry and sectarianism aside, the aim of theoretical physics is to construct mathematical models such as to enable us, from the use of knowledge gathered in a few observations, to predict by logical processes the outcomes in many other circumstances. Any logically sound theory satisfying this condition is a good theory, whether or not it be derived from 'ultimate' or 'fundamental' truth. It is as ridiculous to deride continuum physics because it is not obtained from nuclear physics as it would be to reproach it with lack of foundation in the Bible." (Clifford Truesdell & Walter Noll, "The Non-Linear Field Theories of Mechanics", 1965)
"When the problems in physics become difficult we may often look to the mathematician who may already have studied such things and have prepared a line of reasoning for us to follow. On the other hand they may not have, in which case we have to invent our own line of reasoning, which we then pass back to the mathematician." (Richard Feynman, "The Character of Physical Law", 1965)
"[...] we are essentially viewing the purpose of physics as a scientific discipline as invention rather than discovery. [...] the term 'invention' implies that the physicist uses not only observation but his imaginative powers to construct points of view that identify with experience." (Robert B Lindsay, Arbitrariness in Physics, Physics Today Vol. 120 (12), 1967)
"Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i.e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment. [...] However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)
"It is impossible, and it has always been impossible, to grasp the meaning of what we nowadays call physics independently of its mathematical form." (Jacob Klein, "Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra", 1968)
"It is probably no exaggeration to say that all of theoretical physics proceeds by analogy." (Jeremy Bernstein, "Elementary Particles and Their Currents", 1968)
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