Quotes About Particles

Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms

Is a universe of discrete material particles possible only with one specific set of natural laws and parameter values? In other words, does human imagination, which can conceive of other laws and values, thereby exceed possible existence?

He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.

Dust floats through the feeble beam of the flashlight: ten thousand particles, turning softly, twinkling.

Marie-Laure hesitates over the open door, smelling the fires from outside and the clammy, almost opposite smell washing up from the bottom. Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafés, trees. People.

An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.

Colors come from a phenomenon called scattering. The wavelengths of light and the size of the particles determine the colors.

As we shall see in the next section, however, all fundamental particles have zero mass. A zero-mass particle necessarily moves at the speed of light.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ....

The sky was packed which by appearing endless seems inevitable. The flag droops straight down. The horse in dry sand walks with a chirping noise from friction of the particles and counterarguments like pack ice puff in the waves there, blowing fountains of pearl. The ground.

An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.

What's more, random events can mimic nonrandom ones. Even the most sophisticated scientists can have difficulty telling the difference between a real effect and a random fluke. Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

Particles like protons or electrons occupy microscopic niches into which only one particle is allowed to sit. Any attempt to compress matter so that more than one particle would be squeezed into each niche is met by a resisting force. The balance between this force and the inward push of gravity results in the large, stable, cold bodies we see in the solar system.

Quantum mechanics holds sway in the microworld of atoms and elementary particles. It teaches us that every mass in Nature, however solid or pointlike it may appear, has a wavelike aspect. This wave is not like a water wave. It is more analogous to a crime wave or a wave of hysteria: it is a wave of information.

You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

On a global scale we have the example of pollution. Individual humans have freely burned fossil fuels and greatly increased the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2, leading to a continuing rise in the earth's temperature over the last century. The tiny particles also emitted have caused lung diseases and deaths. But each polluter gains more individually from his own actions than he loses, so he has no direct pressure to change.

One of the questions that always puzzled human history is, what are we, and everything around us, made of.

The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works.

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.

Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles.

The only way a djinni can advance in rank and increase in power is to obtain more knowledge. For example, djinn can manipulate the matter in the universe by changing the vibration of strings. This action is much like playing a guitar: the more chords a person knows, the wider the repetoire. Individual string vibrations determine the type of particles and matter formed, and djinn are able to change the "notes" of the strings, thus changing one form of matter into another.