Quotes About Physics

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

If we zipped around at precisely the speed of light, we would never experience any duration at all, no matter how we traveled.

So either closed timelike curves can't exist, or big macroscopic things can't travel on truly closed paths through spacetime—or everything we think we know about thermodynamics is wrong.

STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND

If any particle we haven't yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now. One

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

When we see a planet being "deflected by the force of gravity," Einstein says it is really just traveling in a straight line.

There are tiny hints in the data that may indicate that this new particle is not just the minimal Higgs.

Calculating the relevant processes provides full employment for theoretical physicists.

Are you sure you're not a Boltzmann Brain? Or at least, do you know your local environment didn't recently fluctuate into existence? How do you know you're

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. He is the author of From Eternity to Here and

Information is physical.

To understand why the Second Law works in our real world, it is not sufficient to simply apply statistical reasoning to the underlying laws of physics; we must also assume that the observable universe began in a state of very low entropy

Christopher Savage have calculated that in reasonable models, we expect about ten dark-matter particles to interact with the atoms in a typical human body every year. The effects of every individual interaction are pretty negligible, so don't worry about getting a dark matter stomachache.

Any possible vibration of a quantum field can be thought of as a combination of vibrations with different specific wavelengths—just as any particular sound can be decomposed into a combination of various notes with specific frequencies.

Part of the sting was taken away when the American Physical Society awarded its 2010 Sakurai Prize in theoretical physics to Hagen, Englert, Guralnik, Higgs, Brout, and Kibble—in that order, which seems to have been chosen specifically to make it impossible for anyone to complain. (Anderson might have reasonably complained.)

The main trick is to define the four-velocity as a derivative with respect to the proper time Ï" along the trajectory, rather than with respect to the coordinate time t. We write the

Now comes the real magic. In pre-relativistic Newtonian mechanics, momentum is represented by a three-vector given by mass times velocity, . In the world of relativity, we define the four-momentum in an analogous way, as mass times four-velocity:

This book is about the nature of time, the beginning of the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality.

But honest physicists admit that we don't truly understand quantum mechanics.

The minus sign in the proper-time formula (6.2) opens up an interesting possibility. If we consider a straight path that traverses equal amounts of space and time, (?x)2 = (?t)2, we will have ? = 0. So the object moves, but no proper time elapses along its journey.

wormholes don't grow on trees.

Then we compare the predicted abundance of such a WIMP with the actual abundance of dark matter.