Quotes About Particles

Tanto los protones como los neutrones están hechos de partículas aún más pequeñas, que el físico estadounidense Murray Gell-Mann bautizó con el nombre de «quarks», inspirándose en una palabra sin sentido en una frase sin sentido —«Three quarks for Muster Mark!»— que aparece en el Finnegans Wake de James Joyce. Todas las cosas que tocamos están hechas, pues, de electrones y de estos quarks.

Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things; a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippy world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.

the particles are quanta of quantum fields; light is formed by quanta of a field; space is nothing more than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges from the processes of this same field. In other words, the world is made entirely from quantum fields (

Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.

the particles are quanta of quantum fields; light is formed by quanta of a field; space is nothing more than a field, which is also made of quanta;

the world is made entirely from quantum fields

If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of space and elementary particles, then what are we? Do we also consist only of quanta and particles? If so, then from where do we get that sense of individual existence and unique selfhood to which we can all testify? And what then are our values, our dreams, our emotions, our individual knowledge? What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?

A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and nonexistence and swarm in space, even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies; of the innumerable stars; of sunlight; of mountains, woods, and fields of grain; of the smiling faces of the young at parties; and of the night sky studded with stars.

A handful of elementary ingredients that act like bricks in a gigantic Lego set, and with which the entire material reality surrounding us is constructed. The nature of these particles, and the way they move, is described by quantum mechanics.

Even if we observe a small, empty region of space in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of these particles.

The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events.

The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.

We are all dust.

Dust too is drawn on wings to light.

Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.

night and day, a hundred billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through each square inch of your body, every second, without a trace of interaction with your body's atoms.

Bosons, by the way, are named for the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose.

The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks.

Quarks are quirky beasts. Unlike protons, each with an electric charge of +1, and electrons, with a charge of –1, quarks have fractional charges that come in thirds.

Shortly before, during, and after the strong and electroweak forces parted company, the universe was a seething soup of quarks, leptons, and their antimatter siblings, along with bosons, the particles that enable their interactions.

During the quark–lepton era the universe was dense enough for the average separation between unattached quarks to rival the separation between attached quarks.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!" One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

A millionth of a second has passed since the beginning. This tepid universe was no longer hot enough or dense enough to cook quarks, and so they all grabbed dance partners, creating a permanent new family of heavy particles called hadrons (from the Greek hadros, meaning "thick").

The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.