A Quote by John Horton Conway
If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles.
Related Quotes
The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists.
We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.
I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.
Quantum physics is teaching us that particles themselves don't create particles. It's what Jesus said 2,000 years ago, that it's the Spirit that gives life and that you don't get particles from more particles.
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.
[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.
Whenever two particles come together, they are held by a certain attraction; and there will come a time when those particles will separate. This is the eternal law. So, wherever there is a body - either grosser or finer, either in heaven or on earth - death will overcome it.
Specific units - such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA.
I work in string theory. This is a branch of physics which assumes that the elementary objects in the universe are not particles but one-dimensional objects, that is, strings.
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.
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.
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.
The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects-at that time we needed three types of them-elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. ... I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, "Three quarks for Muster mark," from Finnegan's Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.
The Bible puts forth a strong case for no free will and that's a real problem you know, because the justification for supposedly being punished after death is that you had free will. If you didn't have free will and you did what God predetermined, then how can he punish you?"
The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
Now the smallest Particles of Matter may cohere by the strongest Attractions, and compose bigger Particles of weaker Virture.... There are therefore Agents in Nature able to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attraction. And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to find them out.
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