Quotes About Mechanics

Old cars have things to say. With an old car, you have to be extra observant about everything. You have to listen and pay attention - to how the engine sounds, where the oil levels are at, if it's running hot, all of that. You've gotta be tuned in, and I like that. New cars, to me they just feel like plain sheets of metal.

When I started presenting 'Scrapheap Challenge,' I was rubbish at tuning V8 engines.

My mom's an art teacher, so I always had music in the house. She always had records, and I was mesmerized by the mechanics of how a turntable works.

Part of our job is to dig deep and rediscover the joy that we had when we were first starting out. Also, when you gain responsibility, if you are the host of a TV show and you have responsibilities as a producer and a writer and so forth, you then have to deal with the mechanics of it, which is not always fun.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

Now, what that means is that there is fundamental indeterminacy from quantum mechanics, but besides that there are other sources of effective indeterminacy.

Quantum mechanics has a similar problem, a problem related to the zero-point energy. The laws of quantum mechanics treat particles such as the electron as points; that is, they take up no space at all. The electron is a zero-dimensional object, and its very zerolike nature ensures that scientists don't even know the electron's mass or charge.

As a former competitor, robot combat is near and dear to my heart. I enjoy the mix of creativity and mayhem that are essential to this sport.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

I respect motorcycles so much.

I always liked motorcycles and cars when I was a kid.

I'm fearless when it comes to engineering and motors and gears and pulleys and glass and artwork.

Most robotic heads have 20 motors. Mine have 32.

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.

It is interesting that a pair of isolated pulses yields a stable system: the emis- sion of two diverging digital particles (Fig. 19). Appar- ently only certain configura- tions are possible, while oth- ers are excluded or provide no stable results. This bears a certain similarity to some situations in quantum mechanics.

At first he did not realize what he had accomplished; he thought that he had remained within the boundaries of mechanics, that he was computing actual numbers of molecules, without realizing how much probability was involved.

There is no mechanical impossibility, it is merely the fact that there are so many more possible positions of the various powder grains that will give a grey appearance, as compared to the much smaller number of configurations in which the grains are well ordered.

Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting microevents.

When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that "God does not play dice," Bohr responded by admonishing him, "Stop telling God what to do." Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

Special relativity may be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum velocity for all physical systems. Quantum mechanics can be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum of information for each physical system.

T]he elementary form of the mechanics of the world...does not need to mention 'time.' The world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It's a net of interconnected events, where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules that, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. And it's a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains; aridly beautiful as the cracked lips of the adolescent you loved.

This is Dirac's quantum mechanics: a recipe for calculating the spectra of the variables, and a recipe for calculating the probability that one or another value in the spectrum appears during an interaction.