Quotes About Couplings

Hadn't I been humiliated when I was looking longingly at Roger Federer's twin on the Tube and he offered me his seat? Our bodies continue to make fools of us as we age. Lust doesn't die to spare the sensitivities of the grossed-out young who prefer not to think of wrinkly couplings, and - this is really cruel - carnal feelings are among the very last to checkout.

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called primitive societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.

for the pair themselves their closeness carried both a spark of the exotic and the comfort of familiarity, as many couplings do, when they first begin.

The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations.