Quotes About Particles

If you bang two electrons together with enough energy, you produce protons. If there are no independent laws, then all the properties of protons must somehow be 'known' by the electrons. By extension, every elementary particle must carry around enough information to produce the entire universe. I find that difficult to believe.

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

I work in string theory. This is a branch of physics which assumes that the elementary objects in the universe are not particles but one-dimensional objects, that is, strings.

Over the ensuing years, researchers would discover new forces in nature, besides electromagnetism and gravity, and also new particles. These would make Einstein's attempts at unification all the more complex. But he would find himself less familiar with the latest data in experimental physics, and he thus would no longer have the same intuitive feel for how to wrest from nature her fundamental principles.

Activity in the Sun reaches its highest point once every 11 years. Throughout this period, the Sun rains high energy particles and radiation down on Earth.

But another possibility is that a neutron star's center contains exotic particles called kaons. This would lower the critical mass compared

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

I was having a conversation with my father and he was talking about this thing - strangeness and charm. It's actually the name of the two smallest particles that there are when you split the atom, so I wrote a song around it. I even managed to fit the word 'hydrogen' in there. Isn't that a nice thing for scientists to call them though?

Newton must have been right when he'd said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

Imagine your fears are particles of dust," he said. "Pinpoint each one individually and narrow your mind onto that minuscule piece. And then, Paul, then you can examine it. It is so small it cannot hurt you.

If antimatter and matter make contact, both are destroyed instantly. Physicists call the process 'annihilation.

You're telling me that CERN dug out millions of tons of earth just to smash tiny particles?" Kohler shrugged. "Sometimes to find truth, one must move mountains.

Everything decayed, the perfectly ordered crystal eventually turned into random particles of dust.

You're telling me that CERN dug out millions of tons of earth just to smash tiny particles?

Fully accelerated particles circled the tube at over 180,000 miles per second.

El aire de los museos era el mismo en todas partes: una atmósfera meticulosamente filtrada para eliminar todas las partículas y oxidantes y luego humectada con agua ionizada hasta alcanzar el 45% de humedad.

Los protones tienen electrones.

T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a Gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine. The Atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of light Are sands upon the Red sea shore Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

We are, quite literally, star dust.

Theory and experiment both show us that light does not need a material medium for propagation. We would have no trouble understanding this if light were nothing but particles zooming along through empty space. But that is not the way it goes: Light is a vibration, an oscillation made up of elementary oscillations we call photons. But there is no substance that oscillates when light propagates; thus we cannot impede the propagation of light when we remove substances from some given space.

The vacuum of physics contains in its faculties everything that the laws of nature will permit. It fluctuates-the virtual particles come and go. The only thing they may be missing is the energy it would take to make them appear as real particles. All that can appear in reality must be present as a possibility- as a state of virtual particles-in a vacuum. Addd energy to the vacuum and those virtual states may appear as particles.

Before the particles that we observe today materialized, all matter in the early universe must have gone through this stage of a quark-gluon soup, or plasma.