Meteorologists don't use a script, and most create their own graphics and certainly put together their own forecasts. Most of us went to school to become scientists - at least I did - and studied thermodynamics, physics, and tons of calculus to take this young science to the next level. Our accuracy is amazing and will only continue to improve.
Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.
I have been connected with the Niels Bohr Institute since the completion of my university studies, first as a research fellow and, from 1956, as a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen. After the death of my father in 1962, I followed him as director of the Institute until 1970.
I chose to pursue a career in physics because there the truth isn't so easily bent.
We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.
The exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman.
In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesn't obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.
To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.
Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.
If you're talking about nuclear physics, I have to defer to the next guy. But if you're talking about football, I don't have to take a back seat to anyone.
I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.
There are physicists, and there are string theorists. Of course the string theorists are physicists, but the string theorists in general will not attend lectures on experimental physics. They will not be terribly concerned about the results of experiments. They will talk to one another.
One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.
We're always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough, we're okay.
You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.
The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.
I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.
The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.
People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.
My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.
Semiconductor research and the Nobel Prize in physics seem to be contradictory since one may come to the conclusion that such a complicated system like a semiconductor is not useful for very fundamental discoveries.
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
I come home from trying to pretend to know about astronomy and physics all day and turn on 'The Real Housewives'.
Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter came from.
When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.
In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
I actually studied literature at university, so I'm much more of an arts-based person, but I remember I actually did enjoy physics because you got to do weird experiments. I remember we did this thing with static where we all had to put our hands on this static ball to see that your hair would all stand on end.
As an undergrad, I studied engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma, and all my degrees are from engineering departments. My father wanted me to join him in the oil-field business in Oklahoma, but I wanted to be a scientist.
The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'
Fascinated by history during my secondary education, then by physics and mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique, I finally entered the national administration of mines in 1936.
The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.
