A Quote by Richard P. Feynman
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
Related Quotes
Subatomic particles do not just sit around being subatomic particles. They are beehives of activity.
Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing into mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality.
Entanglement can best be understood as this: When subatomic matter is in a process together, subsequently the subatomic particles go apart from each other and go across the universe. When they do this, they will remain entangled. That means if you do something to one, the other one responds immediately, instantaneously.
String theory?[pause] It closed the conceptual gulp between relativity and quantum mechanics. It postulates that subatomic particles are not points, but strings, about one planck length long. The rate at which strings vibrate can generate the properties of all known particles. Huh? How did I know that?
Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.
I think the Bible is completely inspired by God in its overall messages. But, for the people of those days to know what was going to happen 4,000 years later in a world of astronomy or subatomic particles. They didn't have access to the knowledge that we presently have about geology. So, we know now that the world was created many of billions of years ago, 13 or 14 billion years ago. As far as they knew, the earth was the center of the universe. They thought that stars were little twinkling things in the sky where as now we know stars are very distant and much larger than the earth.
In quantum physics, the study of material at the subatomic level, you get down to the tiniest levels. When they take these subatomic particles, put them in particle accelerators and collide them, quantum physicists discover there's nothing there. There's no one home - no ghost in the machine.
Our natural state of being is in relationship, a tango, a constant state of one influencing the other. Just as the subatomic particles that compose us cannot be separated from the space and particles surrounding them, so living beings cannot be isolated from each other... By the act of observation and intention, we have the ability to extend a kind of super-radiance to the world.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.
It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is the greatest need for having a fixed goal, for having an air castle that the outside world cannot wreck. When few comforts come from without, it is all the more necessary to have a fount to draw from within. And the man or woman who has a star toward which to press cannot be thrown off the course, no matter how the world may try, no matter how far things seem to be wrong.
Part of living is understanding where the fringes are. Once you know how far people go, you can say, "Well, here's how I choose to represent myself."
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.
Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed - at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.
I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.
The universe is random. It's not inevitable. It's simple chaos. It's subatomic particles in endless, aimless collision. That's what science teaches us, but what is this saying? What is it telling us, when on the very night that this man's daughter dies, it's me who's having a drink with him? How can that be random?
Unless we know history, we will have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America and the rest of the world more livable, humane, and democratic.
Related Authors
Alan Lightman Quotes
American
Physicist
Albert Einstein Quotes
German
Physicist
Brian Greene Quotes
American
Physicist
Freeman Dyson Quotes
American
Physicist
Gregory Benford Quotes
American
Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
American
Physicist
James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
Scottish
Physicist
Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes
American
Physicist
Leonard Mlodinow Quotes
American
Physicist
Lisa Randall Quotes
American
Physicist
Michio Kaku Quotes
American
Physicist
Murray Gell-Mann Quotes
American
Physicist
Niels Bohr Quotes
Danish
Physicist
Roger Penrose Quotes
English
Physicist
Stephen Hawking Quotes
English
Physicist
Werner Heisenberg Quotes
German
Physicist