Quotes About Physics

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow`s speed.

you must have carbon.23  Arsenic, boron, and silicon are the only other elements on which complex molecules can be based, but arsenic and boron are relatively rare and, where concentrated, poisonous to life, and silicon can hold together no more than about a hundred amino acids. Only carbon yields the chemical bonding stability and bonding complexity that life requires. Given the constraints of physics and chemistry, we now know that physical life must be carbon-based.

Tegmark cites the work of renowned physicists Paul Steinhardt of Princeton and Neil Turok of Cambridge University, whose calculations indicate the existence of a second three-dimensional brane that is literally parallel to our own plane of existence but separate from us because it is just a tiny fraction higher on the dimensional scale. It's there, and it is part of our current reality, whether we can see it or not.

Sadly, I know not clearly of the subject of physics. Instead, I learn of the complex human nature, the epic mind, The Grand Cosmos, and the unknownness beyond the edge of The Cosmos known as The Universe.

At age forty-two, Ben Franklin retired from his profession as newspaper and magazine publisher to the American colonies to pursue other interests. His aim now was to satisfy his insatiable scientific curiosity. What caused a high-pitched violin to break a glass? Why does electricity go through water but not wood? Such questions then fell under the heading of natural philosophy, what we today call physics. (The term "scientist" was not coined until 1833.)

In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace.

The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.

From a theoretical point of view, it is very hard to imagine how gravity could avoid being quantized.

For two events separated in time, a geodesic is the natural path things would take in spacetime to connect one event to the other.

Nonetheless, in all cases matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move.

Some branes are "slices" inside the space, but others are "slices" that bound space, like slices of bread in a sandwich. Either way, a brane is a domain that has fewer dimensions than the full higher-dimensional space that surrounds or borders it.

All of the lightest stable quarks and leptons have heavier replicas. No one knows why they are there, or what they are good for. When physicists first realized that the muon, a particle first seen in cosmic rays, was nothing other than a heavier version of the electron (200 times heavier), the physicist I.I. Rabi asked, "Who ordered that?

However, you will need to know about flavors and generations because of the strong constraints on the particles' properties, which give us vital clues and constraints on the physics that lies beyond the Standard Model. Chief among these constraints is that different flavors of quarks and leptons with the same charges rarely, if ever, turn into one another.

My second concern about Occam's Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don't seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we've deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn't the correct one.

calculations

When a field takes a nonzero value, the best way to think about it is to imagine space manifesting the charge that the field carries, but not containing any actual particles.

But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact. This book explores

The problem is that string theory is defined at an energy scale that is about ten million billion times larger than those we can experimentally explore with our current instruments.

Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From

The goal of particle physics is to discover matter's most basic constituents and the most fundamental physical laws obeyed by those constituents.

That's what's "special" in special relativity: the "special" inertial frames are only a small subset of all possible reference frames.

If an extra dimension is rolled up into a circle, the mass of the lightest such particle would differ from the electron's mass by an amount inversely proportional to the extra dimension's size. That means that, the larger the extra dimension, the smaller the particle's mass.

If large extra dimensions solve the hierarchy problem, higher-dimensional gravity would become strong at about a TeV.