Special Relativity Quotes (5 quotes)
[Lecturing:] This has been done elegantly by Minkowski; but chalk is cheaper than grey matter, and we will do it as it comes.
Via George Pólya, present at an early lecture on Special Relativity by Einstein, who at the time preferred to show his own old formulation, not yet embracing Minkowski’s geometrical reformulation. Quote given as Pólya’s recollection in J.E. Littlewood, A Mathematician’s Miscellany, (1953). Also in the expanded edition, Béla Bollobás (ed.), 'Odds and Ends',
Littlewood’s Miscellany (1986), 152.
I do not see any reason to assume that the heuristic significance of the principle of general relativity is restricted to gravitation and that the rest of physics can be dealt with separately on the basis of special relativity, with the hope that later on the whole may be fitted consistently into a general relativistic scheme. I do not think that such an attitude, although historically understandable, can be objectively justified. The comparative smallness of what we know today as gravitational effects is not a conclusive reason for ignoring the principle of general relativity in theoretical investigations of a fundamental character. In other words, I do not believe that it is justifiable to ask: What would physics look like without gravitation?
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It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example—in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism—the positions are now reversed. Science will not tolerate criticism of special relativity, while Theology talks freely about the death of God, religionless Christianity, and so on.
In 'Preface', Science at the Crossroads (1972), 13.
Quantum mechanics and relativity, taken together, are extraordinarily restrictive, and they therefore provide us with a great logical machine. We can explore with our minds any number of possible universes consisting of all kinds of mythical particles and interactions, but all except a very few can be rejected on a priori grounds because they are not simultaneously consistent with special relativity and quantum mechanics. Hopefully in the end we will find that only one theory is consistent with both and that theory will determine the nature of our particular universe.
As quoted in John D. Barrow, The Universe that Discovered Itself (2000), 360.
The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.
'Classical to Quantum: A Generalized Phase Transition', in A. van der Merwe et al. (eds.) Microphysical Reality and Quantum Formalism (1987), 145.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
