Quotes About Particles

During the eleven-year sunspot cycle, for example, solar flares can send enormous quantities of deadly plasma racing toward Earth. In the past, this phenomenon has forced the astronauts on the space station to seek special protection against the potentially lethal barrage of subatomic particles.

Aquí, estamos reorganizando las partículas de nuestras ecuaciones de manera que los fermiones se intercambian por bosones, y viceversa. Esto se convierte en el punto central de la teoría de cuerdas, así que todas las partículas del universo se pueden sustituir unas por otras.

This means that subatomic particles are just like musical notes. The universe is a symphony of strings, physics represents the harmonies of these notes, and the "mind of God" that Einstein chased after for so many decades is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace.

The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

According to string theory, if we could examine these particles with even greater precision—a precision many orders of magnitude beyond our present technological capacity—we would find that each is not pointlike, but instead consists of a tiny one-dimensional loop. Like an infinitely thin rubber band, each particle contains a vibrating, oscillating, dancing filament that physicists, lacking Gell-Mann's literary flair, have named a string.

Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose—stars, planets, people, etc.—amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority of the universe, at least as measured by mass.

The equations are indifferent to the supposed freedom of human will. Some have taken this to mean that in a classical universe, free will would be an illusion. You are made of a collection of particles, so if the laws of classical physics could determine everything about your particles at any moment—where they'd be, how they'd be moving and so on—your willful ability to determine your own actions would appear fully compromised.

so, with only finitely many different particle arrangements, the arrangements of particles within patches must be duplicated an infinite number of times. That's the result we've been after.

Just as important, the energy released by the inflaton field isn't lost-instead, like a cooling vat of steam condensing into water droplets, the inflaton's energy condenses into a uniform bath of particles that fill space. This two-step process-brief but rapid expansion, followed by energy conversion to particles-results in a huge, uniform spatial expanse that's filled with the raw material of familiar structures like stars and galaxies.

But the gravitational attraction between two smaller things, like two electrons, is a million billion billion billion billion times weaker than their electromagnetic repulsion.

how utterly wondrous it is that a small collection of the universe's particles can rise up, examine themselves and the reality they inhabit, determine just how transitory they are, and with a flitting burst of activity create beauty, establish connection, and illuminate mystery.

without intent or design, without forethought or judgment, without planning or deliberation, the cosmos yields meticulously ordered configurations of particles from atoms to stars to life.

Witten's result showed that much as the Wizard of Oz's frightening visage was produced by an ordinary man, a rapacious black hole is the holographic projection of something equally ordinary: a bath of hot particles in the boundary theory (Figure 9.6). Like a real hologram and the image it generates, the two theories-a black hole in the interior and a hot quantum field theory on the boundary-bear no apparent resemblance to each other, and yet they embody identical information.

Many find it fatuous and downright repugnant to claim that the wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

We are all stardust

The fact that atoms are composed of three kinds of elementary particles—protons, neutrons and electrons—is a comparatively recent finding. The neutron was not discovered until 1932. Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns make, essentially, everything.

Everyday life depends on the structure of the atom. Turn off the electrical charges and everything crumbles to an invisible fine dust, without electrical forces, there would no longer be things in the universe - merely diffuse clouds of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and gravitating spheres of elementary particles, the featureless remnants of worlds.

A physicist who is able to see the interpenetration and interbeing of elementary particles without going beyond his or her intellect has, from the viewpoint of Buddhist liberation, attained just a decorative facade. -Someone who studies Buddhism without practicing meditation has also accumulated knowledge only as decoration.

We still have not yet fully understood electrons and nuclei; for scientists, a speck of dust is very exciting. A particle of dust is a marvel.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Alpha particles tunnel out of uranium nuclei at the predicted rate to produce the effect known as radioactivity. Tunneling also plays an important role in the nuclear-fusion processes that make the sun shine, so life on Earth depends partially on tunneling

At sufficiently high energy the force of gravitation between two typical elementary particles becomes as strong as any other force between them. The energy at which this happens is about a thousand million billion billion volts. This is known as the Planck energy.

The sobbing echoes of the woman's song streamed away down the twisting alleys and the last particles of dust fell back on the street.

But Laplace's particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings.