Particles Quotes

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
― Niels Bohr, Essays 1932-1957 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 2)

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.”
― John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality

“When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS,
THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS
AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL
THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY OF COMBINATIONS”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vols 1-2

“The Uncertainty Principle states that you can know where a particle is, or you can know where it's going, but you can't know both at the same time. The same, it turns out, is true of people. And when you try, when you look too closely, you get the Observer Effect. By trying to work out what's going on, you're interfering with destiny. A particle can be in two places at once. A particle can interfere with its own past. It can have multiple futures, and multiple pasts. The universe is complicated.”
― Harriet Reuter Hapgood, The Square Root of Summer

“The very small quantum world, it seems, is a mixture of possibilities. The quantum fields to which all particles belong are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, one possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by seeing it, just by the very act of detecting it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. Nobody knows why or how this happens.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“the Z-particle Pure energy—no mass at all. It may well be the
smallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read.”
― Philip Pullman, Lyra's Oxford

“Quantum particles do not behave like tennis balls, but like the quantum particles they are. To get from one place to another, they take all the possible paths in space and time as long as these paths link their starting point to their end point. The particle [...] literally went everywhere. Simultaneously. To the left and to the right of the post. And through it. And outside the room. And into the future and back - until the moment when it hit a detector on the wall.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“Leonardo believed his research had the
potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of
an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected… that
the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine… that there is a single force
moving within all of us.” Langdon felt disconcerted. And the power of God shall unite us all. “Mr. Vetra actually found a way
to demonstrate that particles are connected?”
“Conclusive evidence. A recent Scientific American article hailed New Physics as a surer path to God
than religion itself.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“You’re telling me that CERN dug
out millions of tons of earth just to smash tiny particles?”
Kohler shrugged. “Sometimes to find truth, one must move mountains.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“She figured that the main problem in physics is physicists, that most of them are caught in a mind trap because they're so used to things being made of smaller things. So they instinctively believe that reality, at its most basic level, must be made up of and regulated by almost infinitely small elementary particles.”
― Rajnar Vajra, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2013 January/February

“A photon or an electron is not a thing, it is a description of a relationship.”
― R.A. Delmonico

“Einstein and his colleagues made the perfectly reasonable assumption of locality: that the properties of a particle are localized on that particle, and what happens here can’t affect what happens there without some way of transmitting the effects across the intervening space. It seems so self-evident that it hardly appears to be an assumption at all. But this locality is just what quantum entanglement undermines – which is why ‘spooky action at a distance’ is precisely the wrong way to look at it. We can’t regard particle A and particle B in the EPR experiment as separate entities, even though they are separated in space. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, entanglement makes them both parts of a single object. Or to put it another way, the spin of particle A is not located solely on A in the way that the redness of a cricket ball is located on the cricket ball. In quantum mechanics, properties can be non-local. Only if we accept Einstein’s assumption of locality do we need to tell the story in terms of a measurement on particle A ‘influencing’ the spin of particle B. Quantum non-locality is the alternative to that view.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Einstein’s revelations disclosed the mind-boggling truth that spirituality had been alluding to for millennia: The material reality we perceive is essentially non-physical. Yet the sciences have still not grasped the most profound implications of this fact. Physicists insist there must be even smaller particles to be found that will somehow bring their ledgers to account, making the forces in their theories correctly add up. Like other belief systems, science is based on faith in the firm physicality of the universe, expediently disregarding that, ultimately, it is not.”
― Debra Gavant

“If everything in the past is a particle and everything in the future is a wave, then it’s very important to not allow some of the particles to ever reach your memory, especially the particles of someone else’s disintegrated consciousness.”
― Elena Y. Goldberg

“I’m relieved to see
that even brilliant physicists make mistakes.”
Kohler looked over. “What do you mean?”
“Whoever wrote that note made a mistake. That column isn’t Ionic. Ionic columns are uniform in width. That one’s tapered. It’s Doric—the Greek counterpart. A common mistake.”
Kohler did not smile. “The author meant it as a joke, Mr. Langdon. Ionic means containing ions—electrically charged particles. Most objects contain them.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Ndani ya sekunde moja baada ya ulimwengu wetu kuumbwa, miaka bilioni kumi na tatu nukta saba tano iliyopita, chembe zote ndogo zinazopatikana ndani ya atomu zilitengenezwa. Zote hizo zimeshapatikana isipokuwa 'Higgs Boson', na 'Higgs Boson' ndiyo ya muhimu kuliko zote.”
― Enock Maregesi

“When does a wave behave like a particle?
When one or more dimensions collapse to zero or nearly zero.
Action in a field creates the spacetime it inhabits and dimensions, like particles, may be virtual.
Gravity is a variation of scale and ratio is the only thing that is discrete.”
― R.A. Delmonico

“If dimensions are created by the action in a field then the intersection of the point and plane are what gives us the point particle.”
― R.A. Delmonico

“Supposing a new era begins after the big crunch, will the number of protons (or baryons) be the same in the next cycle? Will the protons retain a memory of their previous life in the earlier epoch of the universe when deciding to decay or not to decay? Will there be subsequent cycles of big bangs and big crunches? If so, will proton decay affect the cycles of the far future? There exist no answers to such questions at present.”
― Jamal Nazrul Islam, The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

“I just need to know something about him that will make me believe that there's even a sliver of a chance that his particles have a longing to go in a certain direction and only need a nudge.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats.”
― Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

“Evolution means Love in action.”
― Wald Wassermann

“It is not the physicist but the Self-realized [spiritual] master who comprehends the true nature of matter.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda illustrated edition

“If God spoke the world into being, the divine language is energy; the alphabet, elementary particles; God's grammar, the laws of nature."- Daniel Matt, author of God & The Big Bang”
― Serena Jade

“Greek atomists Leucippus, his pupil Democritus, and other metaphysicians knew that the world was not how people saw and perceived it. If they understood atoms even then, the indivisible particles, not modern new atoms, we must believe that they understood much more. If they knew that every sense and sensation is a convention, they could have understood that space and time are conventions, too. Regardless of not thoroughly understanding or elaborating on these concepts, they understood that the world must be something different from what is experienced by the senses or how the senses understand it. If Everything is by a convention of senses, then senses can represent things differently; that is why the eye watches, not the ear. If Everything is a convention, then Everything we experience by senses must be relative.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Energy never goes away, it just changes.”
― Steven Magee