32 Quotes About Particles

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.

I’m relieved to seethat 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.

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.

You’re telling me that CERN dugout millions of tons of earth just to smash tiny particles?”Kohler shrugged. “Sometimes to find truth, one must move mountains.

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.

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.

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.

the Z-particle Pure energy—no mass at all. It may well be thesmallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy.

The real fundamental building blocks of the universe are not indivisible particles, but infinitely divisible moments in time instead.That is to say, the real fundamental building blocks of the universe are not physical, but metaphysical instead.Time itself is the unified force of nature.