Top 55 Particles Quotes

The minute those two little particles inside a woman’s womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That’s not a hard thing to know. But that’s not what’s emphasized.

It is seen that both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now, it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time – the two concepts are too different.

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton.

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

The world’s oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic – bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles – and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary – the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

There is nothing real about film. Nothing. Even the light particles that project the film can’t be proven to exist. Nothing is there.

The application of a strong magnetic field enables the measurement of the energy of the most penetrating particles to be carried out, and the method may be capable of still further extension and improvement.

My interest in matters more directly concerned with the handling of particles was growing, in the meantime, stimulated by many contacts with people understanding accelerators.

When I received my B. S. degree in 1932, only two of the fundamental particles of physics were known.

Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought.

Measurements of the specific ionization of both the positive and negative particles, by counting the number of droplets per unit length along the tracks, showed the great majority of both the positive and negative particles to possess unit electric charge.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we’re correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.

Quarks came in a number of varieties – in fact, at first, only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks – they are called u-type, d-type, s-type.

All at once the cockpit lit up with a sort of white glow because your entry was at 25,000 miles an hour and it was ionising some of the first particles of air you had. So it was kinda a little bit like being inside a weak neon bulb.

All the particles that we are made of only account for about four per cent of the cosmic inventory.

A linear accelerator has the advantage that no magnet is required and that its cost should not rise much more steeply than with the energy of the particles required.

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.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?

The active and abandoned tailings ponds I have photographed, for example, are strangely beautiful – yet they are also chock full of cyanide, which is used in the recovery of microscopic particles of gold from the waste tailings of copper mines.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

We tend to talk about the world in a myriad of ways – a microscopic world of elementary particles, a biological world of organisms and evolution, a social world of morality and meaning. But it’s all the same underlying world. That’s the underlying theme of ‘The Big Picture.’

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.

Sunspots are hubs of intense magnetic activity and they trigger solar flares that launch charged particles, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation and radio waves at the Earth.

Quantum physics is quite interesting. All these tiny particles are there as much as they’re not there. That to me is very, very interesting. And how our thoughts change the outcome of an experiment, I think that’s all quite spiritual.

The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

The discovery that light elements could be disintegrated by artificially accelerated particles gave an additional impetus to development work on the various methods of producing them.

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

People want to know about what’s going on with what’s in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. It’s a lot of curiosity out there.

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can’t even measure them.

The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.

There is no doubt that radium is transformed spontaneously into an active gas, radon, emitting at the same time alpha particles, or helions.

Particles were coming out of the lithium, hitting the screen, and producing scintillations. They looked like stars suddenly appearing and disappearing.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I’d be a botanist.

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did.

If the Big Bang is true, that means everything that came out of it, all of the particles, all of us, there is a scientific force that connects it all that we don’t really know about.

We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.

You have that one basic string, but it can vibrate in many ways. But we’re trying to get a lot of particles because experimental physicists have discovered a lot of particles.