Frank Close - Collected Quotes

"Anyone who has played with Rubik’s cube knows that twisting the top clockwise and then rotating the right hand side to the back gives a different pattern than if you did the two operations in the reverse order. It is easier to see this with a die. If you rotate a die clockwise and then about the vertical, it will be oriented differently to the case where you had first rotated about the vertical and then clockwise. This is why matrices have proved so useful in keeping track of what happens when things rotate in three  dimensions, as the order matters." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"Dirac’s idea of the bottomless sea full of identical electrons also explains why all electrons and positrons created ‘out of the vacuum’ have identical properties rather than emerging with a random continuum of possibilities. Dirac also proposed that pro tons fill the sea, and today we recognize that their more basic seeds, the ‘quarks’ (which we shall meet in chapter 5), also satisfy the exclusion principle and fill an infinitely deep sea. It is the infinitely deep storehouse of the Dirac sea that provides us with the particles, and antiparticles, that we can materialize." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"In Dirac’s interpretation of the vacuum, if one electron in this sea were missing, it would leave a hole. The absence of a negatively charged electron with energy that is negative relative to sea-level, will appear as a positively charged particle with positive energy, namely with all the attributes of what was later called a positron. This was a strange idea, and quantum mechanics is still strange eighty years later; it was only in its infancy when Dirac made his proposal, which was a piece of radical genius." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"Mechanics is the science of motion. It describes how things move from om one point to another as time passes, the greater the distance moved each second so the greater is the speed. If something moving hits you, the impact will depend not just on how fast it’s travelling but also how massive it is. It is the momentum that matters: the product of mass and velocity. Mechanics also deals with energy, especially the energy due to motion, ‘kinetic energy’." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"Many phenomena require more than just real numbers to describe them mathematically. One such generalization of numbers is known as ‘matrices’. These involve numbers arranged in columns or rows with their own rules for addition and multiplication. Ordi nary numbers correspond to having the same number all down the top left to bottom right diagonal [...]." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"Schrodinger’s equation also explained why the orbital motion of electrons in atoms caused the spectral lines to multiply in magnetic fields. However, it gave no explanation for the electron’s own intrinsic ‘spin’. This known property of the electron had no place in Schrodinger’s theory. A more complete quantum mechanics, one that incorporated spin and applied at relativistic speeds, waited to be discovered." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"The first glimpse of the antiworld came not from experiment, a chance discovery, but from the beautiful patterns that Dirac had seen in his equations. As crotchets, minims, and semiquavers on a stave are mere symbols until interpreted by a maestro and transformed into sublime melody, so can arid equations miraculously reveal harmony in nature." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"The ‘Schrodinger Equation’ explained the behavior of electrons in atoms, and showed that in a hydrogen atom the electron is effectively moving with a speed of about two thousand kilometers a second. This is fast to our senses but is less than one percent of the speed of light. Schrodinger’s theory worked, and even today is widely applied to problems in atomic physics." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"There’s matter, like the electron; antimatter, like the positron; and then there are things that are neither matter nor antimatter. The most familiar example of something that is beyond substance is electromagnetic radiation. All electromagnetic radiation, from gamma rays through X-rays and ultra-violet to visible light, infra red, and radio waves, consists of photons of different energies. Matter and antimatter can cancel one another out, their annihilation leaving non-substance in the form of photons; if the conditions are right this sequence can happen in reverse where photons turn into pieces of matter and antimatter." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

"Using matrices, Dirac was able to write an equation relating the total energy of a body to a sum of its energy at rest and its energy in motion, all consistent with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The fact that matrices keep account of what happens when things rotate was a bonus, as the maths was apparently saying that an electron can itself rotate: can spin! Furthermore, the fact that he had been able to solve the mathematics by using the simplest matrices, where a single number was replaced by two columns of pairs, implied a ‘two-ness’ to the spin, precisely what the Zeeman effect had implied. The missing ingredi ent in Schrodinger’s theory had miraculously emerged from the mathematics of matrices, which had been forced on Dirac by the requirements of Einstein’s theory of relativity." (Frank Close, "Antimatter", 2009)

Frederick Soddy - Collected Quotes

"Physical science enjoys the distinction of being the most fundamental of the experimental sciences, and its laws are obeyed universally, so far as is known, not merely by inanimate things, but also by living organisms, in their minutest parts, as single individuals, and also as whole communities. It results from this that, however complicated a series of phenomena may be and however many other sciences may enter into its complete presentation, the purely physical aspect, or the application of the known laws of matter and energy, can always be legitimately separated from the other aspects." (Frederick Soddy, "Matter and Energy", 1912)

"The laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are, however, not solely of importance in pure science. They necessarily come first in order [...] in the whole record of human experience, and they control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race." (Frederick Soddy, "Matter and Energy", 1912)

"The real value of science is in the getting, and those who have tasted the pleasure of discovery alone know what science is. A problem solved is dead. A world without problems to be solved would be devoid of science." (Frederick Soddy, "Matter and Energy", 1912)

"For a modern ruler the laws of conservation and transformation of energy, when the vivifing stream takes its source, the ways it wends its course in nature, and how, under wisdom and knowledge, it may be intertwined with human destiny, instead of careering headlong to the ocean, are a study at least as pregnant with consequences to life as any lesson taught by the long unscientific history of man." (Frederick Soddy, "Science and Life", 1920)

"One of the main duties of science is the correlation of phenomena, apparently disconnected and even contradictory." (Frederick Soddy, "Structure of the Atom", 1920)

"Radioactivity is a new primary science owing allegiance neither to physics nor chemistry, as these sciences were understood before its advent, because it is concerned with a knowledge of the elementary atoms themselves of a character so fundamental and intimate that the old laws of physics and chemistry, concerned almost wholly with external relationships, do not suffice." (Frederick Soddy, "Structure of the Atom", 1920)

"The history of man is dominated by, and reflects, the amount of available energy." (Frederick Soddy, "Science and Life", 1920)

"As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our fellow men have become more and more satisfying as fish have taken up their work which has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane, knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries. Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime." (Frederick Soddy, [Nobel prize speech] 1922)

"Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it." (Frederick Soddy [attributed])

Henry P Stapp - Collected Quotes

"A long-range correlation between observables has the interesting property that the equation of motion which governs the propagation of this effect is precisely the equation of motion of a freely moving particle." (Henry P Stapp, "S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory", 1970)

 "[...] an elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence a set of relationships that reach outward to other things."  (Henry P Stapp, "S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory", 1970)

"If the attitude of quantum mechanics is correct, in the strong sense that a description of the substructure underlying experience more complete than the one it provides is not possible, then there is no substantive physical world, in the usual sense of this term. The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world but rather that there definitely is not a substantive physical world." (Henry P Stapp, "S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory", 1970)

"[the physical world, according to quantum mechanics, is] not a structure built out oi independently existing unanalyzable entities, but lather a web of relationships between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationships to the whole." (Henry P Stapp, "S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory", 1970)

"Our beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world around us are the roots of our values, and our values determine not only our immediate actions, but also, over the course of time, the form of our society. Our beliefs are increasingly determined by science." (Henry P Stapp, "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics", 1993)

"[…] according to the new conception, the physically described world is built not out of bits of matter, as matter was understood in the nineteenth century, but out of objective tendencies - potentialities - for certain discrete, whole actual events to occur. Each such event has both a psychologically described aspect, which is essentially an increment in knowledge, and also a physically described aspect, which is an action that abruptly changes the mathematically described set of potentialities to one that is concordant with the increase in knowledge. This coordination of the aspects of the theory that are described in physical/mathematical terms with aspects that are described in psychological terms is what makes the theory practically useful." (Henry P Stapp, "Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer", 2007)

"Briefly stated, the orthodox formulation of quantum theory asserts that, in order to connect adequately the mathematically described state of a physical system to human experience, there must be an abrupt intervention in the otherwise smoothly evolving mathematically described state of that system." (Henry P Stapp, "Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer", 2007)

"Science is not only the enterprise of harnessing nature to serve the practical needs of humankind. It is also part of man’s unending search for knowledge about the universe and his place within it." (Henry P Stapp, "Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer", 2007)

"The existing general descriptions of quantum theory emphasize puzzles and paradoxes in a way that tend to make non-physicists leery of using in any significant away the profound changes in our understanding of both man and nature wrought by the quantum revolution. Yet in the final analysis quantum mechanics is more understandable than classical mechanics because it is more deeply in line with our common sense ideas about our role in nature than the ‘automaton’ notion promulgated by classical physics." (Henry P Stapp, "Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer", 2007)