Quotes About Physics

Three quarks for Muster Mark!" One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

Since four coordinates are needed, we know that we live in a four-dimensional universe

A millionth of a second has passed since the beginning. This tepid universe was no longer hot enough or dense enough to cook quarks, and so they all grabbed dance partners, creating a permanent new family of heavy particles called hadrons (from the Greek hadros, meaning "thick").

The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.

On the equator, where centrifugal forces are greatest, a 150-pound person will be a slender 149 pounds 14 ounces.

German physicist Heinrich Hertz had shown that the only real difference among the various kinds of light is the frequency of the waves in each band.

The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them

Taken together, you get the best indication that water absorbs microwave frequencies.

Gravity is a marvelous force, but a troubling one.

Dark matter is dark; that means it does not interact with photons

Dark matter particles should be passing through your body right now.

Can space exist in the absence of matter, if matter defines the edge of space?" Merlin

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

In particular, a quantity known as the fine-structure constant, which controls the basic fingerprinting for every element, must have remained unchanged for billions of years. Of

The Speed of Light: It's Not Just a Good Idea It's the Law. Unlike

And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position.† Knowledge

What our phrenological exam says is that we understand how the universe behaved, but that most of the universe is made of stuff about which we are clueless. Our profound areas of ignorance notwithstanding, today, as never before, cosmology has an anchor, because the CMB reveals the portal through which we all walked. It's a point where interesting physics happened, and where we learned about the universe before and after its light was set free.

No experiment ever conducted has ever revealed an object of any form reaching the speed of light.

Filling out the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in order of low-energy and low-frequency to high-energy and high-frequency, we have: radio waves, micro waves, ROYGBIV, ultra violet, x rays, and gamma rays.

So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. It's kind of annoying. But we desperately need it in our calculations to arrive at an accurate description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations on concepts we don't understand, but we'll do it if we have to. And dark matter is not our first rodeo.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know. Maybe there's nothing the matter with the matter, and it's the gravity we don't understand.

If you had a super-duper, jumbo-gigantic finger, and you dragged it across Earth's surface (oceans and all), Earth would feel as smooth as a cue ball.

The Physics of Immortality

At this point, the particles came in two types, called quarks—which rhymes with marks—and leptons. Quarks are quirky beasts. You'll never catch a quark all by itself; it will always be clutching others nearby. I'm sure you have at least one friend or classmate who behaves similarly. Quarks are like those kids who never want to do anything alone, not even walk to the restroom.