Particle Physics Quotes

• It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.

  Martin Rees

  Stars, Learning, Science

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• The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Inspirational, Science, Light

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• Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

  Paul Davies

  Lying, Everyday, Mind

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• The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

  Brian Cox

  Motivation, Inspiration, Mean

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• Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Firsts, Physics

  "The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Volume IV: Causality and Complementarity" edited by Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (1998); later quoted in Karen Michelle Barad "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" (p. 254), 2007.

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• I do not keep up with the details of particle physics.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Details, Physics, Particles

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• Particle physics suffers more from being infected by the socio-political mood of the day than from lack of spectacular opportunities for major and profound discoveries.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Opportunity, Discovery, Profound

  "Future of the field calls for charisma and courage" by Kurt Riesselmann, www.fnal.gov. June 28, 2002.

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• Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.

  Sheldon Lee Glashow

  Science, Working Together, Research

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• You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well.

  Mary Roach

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  "Spook and Stiff author Mary Roach". Interview with Donna Bowman, www.avclub.com. August 27, 2010.

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• Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

  Lisa Randall

  Art, Creativity, Science

  Lisa Randall (2012). “Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe”, p.398, Random House

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• I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Book, Ideas, Physics

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• There were many stages to the Atlantean civilization. During the later stages, scientists became involved with advanced particle physics. In particular they were interested in reverse gravity fields.

  Frederick Lenz

  Civilization, Atlantis, Fields

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• So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Mean, Reality, Connections

  Paul Feyerabend (2001). “Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being”, p.215, University of Chicago Press

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• Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of political economy, but
  that society is now a reflex of key shifts in music theory and practice....
  [Sampladelia is] the sound made by those early-twentieth-century discoveries
  in particle physics and relativiity theory, the projection of the minds of
  Einstein, Heisenbery, and Bohr, their fateful explorations of liquid time,
  curving space, uncertainty fields and relativity theorems, into densely
  configured and fully ambivalent android music tracks

  Arthur Kroker

  Discovery, Practice, Space

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