Top 18 Photons Quotes & Sayings

Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.

Photons come out of nowhere, they cannot be stored, they can barely be pinned down in time, and they have no home in space whatsoever. That is, light occupies no volume and has no mass. The similarity between a thought and a photon is very deep. Both are born in a region beyond space and time where nature controls all processes in that void which is full of creative intelligence.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.

Photons have neither morals nor visas.

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.

My PhD project was actually doing something that required a high-intensity laser. It was supposed to work in a way that many, many photons of light would interact with an atom all at the same time.

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

There is one simplification at least. Electrons behave ... in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way.

For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.

Every now and then, I'll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You've met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes.

Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.