On Physicists III

"The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal." (Stanislaw Ulam, "On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems", 1955)

"Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art." (György Kepes, "The New Landscape In Art and Science", 1956)

"For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created." (Freeman J Dyson, "Mathematics in the Physical Sciences", Scientific American, 1964)

"Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes." (Luis W Alvarez, "Recent Developments in Particle Physics", [Nobel] 1968)

"Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in words - be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations imposed by language and 'linear' thinking. Modern physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate and necessarily inaccurate. They are the counterparts of the Eastern myths, symbols and poetic images, and it is at this level that I shall draw the parallels. The same idea about matter is conveyed, for example, to the Hindu by the cosmic dance of the god Shiva as to the physicist by certain aspects of quantum field theory. Both the dancing god and the physical theory are creations of the mind: models to describe their authors' intuition of reality." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)

"Here is one way to look at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered." (Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing", 1978)

"Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord." (Paul C W Davies, "Superforce", 1984)

"It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her." (Steven Weinberg, "Lectures on the Applicability of Mathematics" , Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 1986)

"Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities." (James Gleick, "Chaos", 1987)

"Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sorts of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean. Not surprisingly, these seldom fit well with data. To produce a really good biological theory, one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could build on what was already there." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit?: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"Theoretical physicists are accustomed to living in a world which is removed from tangible objects by two levels of abstraction. From tangible atoms we move by one level of abstraction to invisible fields and particles. A second level of abstraction takes us from fields and particles to the symmetry-groups by which fields and particles are related. The superstring theory takes us beyond symmetry-groups to two further levels of abstraction. The third level of abstraction is the interpretation of symmetry-groups in terms of states in ten-dimensional space-time. The fourth level is the world of the superstrings by whose dynamical behavior the states are defined." (Freeman J Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions", 1988)