Quotes About Particles

4% of the sand on Normandy beaches is made up of tiny metal particles from the D-Day landings.

La percepción que tenemos del tiempo es errónea. El tiempo es una dimensión repleta de partículas de energía. Cada especie, cada individuo y cada átomo atraviesan esta dimensión de una manera diferente. Puede que algún día demuestre que es el tiempo el que contiene al universo, y no al revés.

The fact was, I had just heard her laugh. And her laugh at once suggested the rosy flesh, the fragrant portals between which it had just made its way, seeming also, as strong, sensual and revealing as the scent of geraniums, to carry with it some microscopic particles of their substance, irritant and secret.

What is the stuff that makes everything that is?" they asked. That this remains the defining question of modern particle physics serves to show that the value of a great question is that it keeps generating answers that, in turn, keep changing as our methods of inquiry change.

The more I fly, the more I'm convinced that the true wonder of modern aviation is the transformation of tasteless particles into something known as airplane food.

The electrical matter consists of particles extremely subtile, since it can permeate common matter, even the densest metals, with such ease and freedom as not to receive any perceptible resistance.

Rover producing clumping of dust (circled) as would occur in atmosphere.

The ancient Epicureans observed that, since we are all made of particles and we observe no sentience after death, fear-based religion is unnecessary and people should focus on living well. After we die, the particles in our bodies return to nature and are recycled into other bodies. There are important ethical repercussions once we accept that we get only one life.

These ancient Atomists (who shared an awe for nature very similar to Carl Sagan's in our own time) developed a full cosmology based on the theory that all things are made of elementary particles and void.4 They rejected all supernatural opinions, posited an early theory of relativity, developed a "doctrine of innumerable worlds," and 2,300 years ago were speculating about extraterrestrial life based on their initial observations about the nature of things.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

I think the fear gets into your blood. It makes your subatomic particles twist and distort. You change, chemically. The fear changes, too. It because not your helper, but your master. You are a slave to it.

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

I've never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as "spooky action at a distance." It's a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they've been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

As McLuhan suggested, media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

There's no hiding from this pain, there are no pills or injections for it. It must hurt, just as a river must flow and fire must burn. It spitefully reminds me that I consist of physical particles, which are slipping away by the second.

In modern science the methods of analysis are principally applied to investigating the nature of material entities. Thus, the ultimate nature of matter is sought through a reductive process and the macroscopic world is reduced to the microscopic world of particles. Yet, when the nature of these particles is further examined, we find that ultimately their very existence as objects is called into question.

I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can't just say, 'Thank you so much, go away now' to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.

Yarn is fundamental, knots are not. Similarly, Hilbert and Mike envisioned a natural order in which the geometry of fields is foremost and twists manifest themselves as particles.

In 1981 the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, inspired by Mendeleyev's example, came up with a classification table for subatomic particles, which he named the eightfold way.

It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self - love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Betta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation - are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode.