c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
...it's nice of Mrs. Goe to think that marching against the juvenile juror law is going to keep kids safe. But the fact is, we're NOT safe. Nobody is. That's the whole point. There's no such thing as being safe--here or anywhere. People get hurt every day. Some people get killed by weirdos like Bob White and some people just get teased to death at the lunch table for drinking orange soda or eating a tuna fish sandwich.
— Kate Klise, Trial by Journal
Little tape recorders, that's what kids are, Cat thought. If you want to find out what your husband is saying behind your back, play Barbie with your daughter.
— Jan Strnad, The Summer We Lost Alice
That’s all kids want to know—that you love them.
— Kim Harrison, Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond
I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Answer Professor Mandell’s letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily “Stop that!” Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.
— Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
I know what dissipate means, Arty. I'm not three, for heaven's sake.
— Eoin Colfer
To build confident and kind kids, we must celebrate their uniqueness.
— Elaina Marie, Happiness is Overrated - Live the Inspired Life Instead
A great mind is just a great mind, and try not to worry too much about what package it's in.
— Kristine Barnett
Conflict is growth trying to happen.
— Julie Holland MD, Moody Bitches: The Truth about the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having and What's Really Making You Crazy...
everything is negotiable. everything.
— Kay M. Rutherford, And I Don't Mean Christmas : A Children's Photo Journal
In truth, I think he was afraid. Rudy Steiner was scared of the book thief's kiss. He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.
— Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Mickey Mouse to a three-year-old is a six-foot-tall RAT!
— Robin Williams
To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.
— Zig Ziglar
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”-Walt Disney
— Lynn Holland
Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.
— Patti Smith Just Kids
Want to get your kids to read more? Try making books easily accessible. Put them where kids can easily reach and don't make them off limits. (within reason)
— Melanie Kirk, The Bible's Story: Saga of the Savior King
Daa-r'uu Wee-z'oo."-Ettie the Explorer
— Lynn  Holland, Ettie Explores Earth:  An Ettie the Explorer Adventure Story
When I wake up on Sunday Mornings - late, you always let me sleep in - I come looking for you, and you're in the backyard with dirt on your knees and two little girls spinning around you in perfect orbit. And you put their hair in pigtails and you let them wear whatever madness they want, and Alice planted a fruit cocktail tree and Noomi ate a butterfly, and they look like me because they're round and golden, but they glow for you.
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Kids want to know when Uncle Hold is coming back," James said with a shrug in his voice."Wow, and they're not even zombies yet?""No, but they're young, they have no taste.""Maybe you're the one with no taste.""Jimmy," he said, referring to his son, "eats crayons. Suzy," his daughter, "drinks air and pretends it's tea.""Maybe you should feed them once in a while.
— Anna Sullivan, Hideaway Cove
There are no dots in Tee'sOr cross in eye'sThere is no connect in child neglect
— Lilly White
Never buy your kid a Puzzle that you can't solve!
— Yatin Patel
Children have a tendency to behave as poorly as the most poorly behaved kid in the room. The laws of physics dictate that if there is a kid screaming and running in the hallway of a hotel, all the other children will scream and run in the hallway of the hotel.
— Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat
You’re nasty and you’re loud,you’re mean enough for two,If I could be a cloud,I’d rain all day on you.
— Jack Prelutsky
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.
— Norman Rockwell
I have heard several people justify working long hours and getting home from work late it night by saying things like, “I have to put in all this time to make up for the vacation we’re going to take this summer.” I bet if I asked your kids, they’d say that they’d rather have you home every night to play with them than the weeklong summer trip to the lake where you’re stressed out the whole time anyways.
— Daniel Willey
Mommy. Do you ever wish a book will never end?
— Angela D'Ambrosio
When I was a wee little kid," remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, "there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, CryoBurn
In reality, Little Ones, there are two winters. One made for kids; the other for adults. The one made for adults is always too cold and always too long. The one made for kids is always perfect. A kid winter is an endless and wild snow carnival where all the rides are free.
— Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
I enjoyed the side bars with fun facts and notable sources for where to get more help. Merrin’s such a fun writer
—  I’d love to see her invite kids into her kitchen for cooking classes. She’d be perfect in the classroom and would entice children to try new foods. It’s the adults that might need fooling.
Daddy,” said the toddler, now seething with righteous indignation, “you are a poo-poo head!”Feigning outrage, JFK lowered his voice. “John,” he said, “no one calls the President of the United States a poo-poo head.
— Christopher Andersen, These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie
Who is going to teach fighting spirit to our kids if they are growing up watching us sitting in a comfortable zone in life.We got to wake up and fight it out in our areas of passion, and be an example for our kids.
— Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom
Ms Finney shared an office on the third floor with several other court reporters. Their software system was called Veritas. Theo had hacked into it before when he had been curious about something that happened in court. It was not a secure system because the information was available in open court. Anyone could walk into the courtroom and watch the trial. Anyone, of course, who was not confined by the rigors of middle school.
— John Grisham, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer
When Frey asked students to draw the creation, the other kids drew animals and Adam and Eve. Caroline covered her paper in black crayon, then held it up to reveal she had punched out holes for the stars and the moon. 'And then there was light', she said…
— Christopher Andersen, These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie
From the moment I met Christina Georgia, I knew why Mr. Bradshaw had chosen her. She was incredibly smart and thoughtful, and her emerald green eyes were huge and wise. Her wispy blond hair was beautiful and shoulder-length, and her bubblegum pink lips stood out on her pale face. She was awesome, and we were friends after about two minutes of talking.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Why would you tell us the truth? If Christina really wasn’t here, you’d tell us she was, to stall us from finding her. If James taught us one thing, it’s how to detect a lie. You just want us to leave so you can get her to talk. By the way, good luck with that -- Ida can’t even get her to admit that she stole her cousin’s candy at Halloween last year. And that was pretty obvious.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Can I brush your hair?” she asked as she led the way, her disposition doing a 180 on a dime. Kids. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t eat ’em for lunch.
— Darynda Jones, Fifth Grave Past the Light
The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
— Emma Donoghue, Room
Kids are kids and not little adults. They're watching and listening to you all the time. They're figuring out the game plan but still don't know all the rules. Talk straight to them and they'll respect you for it.
— Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
Is the music broke, Mommy?
— Edward M. Wolfe, Hell on Ice
There’s something different about her. I realize it’s her breasts—they’re huge. I see that she’s stuffed her bikini top with wet balls of sand.“What is that?” I say. “Scottie. Your suit.”She shields her eyes with her hand and looks down at her chest. “Beach boobs,” she says.“Take that out of there,” I say. “Alex. Why’d you let her do that?”Alex is on her stomach, with the straps of her top untied. She lifts her head toward Scottie. “I didn’t know. Take them out, stupid.”Sid lifts his head. “Honestly,” he says, “big boobs look kind of fatty.”“As Bebe says, boobs suck,” Alex says, “and Sid’s full of shit. He loves big boobs.”“Who’s Bebe?” Scottie lets the sand fall out of her top.“Character from South Park,” Sid says. “And I love small boobs, too, Alex. I’m an equal-opportunity employer.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants
We are all innocent aged kids.
— M.F. Moonzajer, 30 Pieces
Frederick left the young couple gazing into each other’s eyes. Revolting, the way otherwise sensible people could carry on, he decided. Something to do with being married, no doubt. Perhaps it damaged the brain.
— Caroline Stevermer, Magic Below Stairs
The dog growled again, long and ferocious. The hair on my neck tingled.And just when I knew he would attack, a horrible scream split the air, and Darlene passed out and fell over on her side.
— Carol Petrie
Kids are baby goats. They're cute and they have redeeming social value. You are definitely not kids.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.
— Michael Crichton, Prey
I was banished,” said Reven proudly.“What for?” Elfwyn pressed.“The king said I was anathema.”“He doesn’t like athemas?”“Anathema means, like, accursed,” said Jinx. “Probably it was for robbing people.
— Sage Blackwood, Jinx
Growing up, my parents managed to show me the importance of reading without cramming it down my throat. A difficult task, I'm sure. It breaks my heart to think that there are kids out there, ready to have their imaginations lit on fire, excited and wanting to read, and facing naked shelves in their school or local libraries. Rather than complain or wait till the system stops failing our nation's children this is a matter I feel we must take into our own hands. There are children, right now, waiting-wanting to read. What shall we tell them>
— Nathan Fillion
I think children have a degree of wisdom totally unknown by adults
— Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez «Marino»
I made a deal with sharks. I don't swim near them and they don't play cricket.
— J.E. Fison
We must never forget that while striving to leave a better planet to our kids, it is just as important that we strive to leave better kids to our planet.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
You should never use propaganda to teach kids the truth.
— Lisa Samson, The Sky Beneath My Feet
I like kids so much,they're adorable
— Kaye rodger
But mostly because he could be himself - never needing to bend.
— Niki Alling, The Straight Rainbow
Lollipop had been her nickname for me as long as I could remember. I asked her how she came up with the name, and she told me sometimes kids are sweet, and sometimes they just need a good lickin'.
— Lacey Weatherford, The Trouble with Spells
I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.
— Lev Grossman
Lila walked by with her nose in the air. In a straight line behind her, six obedient kindergartners waddled like baby geese, singing in unison, 'Row, row, row your yacht...
— Francine Pascal, The Boyfriend War
Here's what Mike knew about kids: They did stupid stuff. Pretty much all of them.
— Kaya McLaren, How I Came to Sparkle Again
I love shark week, all kids swim for free
— Josh Stern
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)
— Albert Einstein
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
— Niels Bohr
Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.
— Werner Heisenberg
Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.
— Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
God abhors a naked singularity.
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
[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.
Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they?Nope.That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy.Nope again.High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries
Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?
— Richard Feynman
A relativist is an individual who doesn't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
...rather than ask why something happened (i.e. what caused it), Jung asked: What did it happen for? This same tendency appears in physics: Many modern physicists are now looking more for "connections" in nature than for causal laws (determinism).
— M.L. von Franz
I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.
— Stephan Pastis
A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic...
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.
— Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
— Rudy Rucker
Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth
— Archimedes
Objects moving in a circle are under the influence of changing force.
— Melody Mayer
I don't know what laws of physics are involved, but if you fill a gym with teenagersand tell them to stare at one object, heat is actually produced. I half expected tospontaneously combust.Katrina
— Suzanne Selfors
A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works.
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
We are the last generation of humans on Earth!
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.
— K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life
The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays—using them like a magnet!! Incredible!"There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers.
— James Kakalios, The Physics of Superheroes
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.
— Eugene Paul Wigner
...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying "such-and-such will happen in every case." All the microphysicist can say is "such-and-such is, according to statistical probability, likely to happen." This naturally represents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking. It requires a consideration, in a scientific experiment, of the mental outlook of the participant-observer: It could this be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent, "objective" manner.
— M.L. von Franz
Without the time, the world is only a static material; without the sense, the world is only a dead living system
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to why they can be blown at all.
— C. V. (Charles Vernon) Boys
Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.
— Wolfgang Pauli
It was like bouncing tennis balls off a mystery piece of furniture and deducing, from the direction in which the balls ricocheted, whether it was a chair or a table or a Welsh dresser.
— Marcus Chown, We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the universe
There is something lamentable, degrading, and almost insane in pursuing the visionary schemes of past ages with dogged determination, in paths of learning which have been investigated by superior minds, and with which such adventurous persons are totally unacquainted. The history of Perpetual Motion is a history of the fool-hardiness of either half-learned, or totally ignorant persons.
— Henry Dircks, Perpetuum Mobile: Or a History of the Search for Self-Motive Power from the 13th to the 19th Century
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to detect particles always detect particles; experiments designed to detect waves always detect waves. No experiment shows the electron behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time.
— John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century. Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology.
— Gerald Holton, Physics, the Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond
The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....
— Gerald Holton, The Scientific Imagination: With a New Introduction
George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling.At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ...To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples.
— Jonathan Black
Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio.
— Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith
The prime number 137 had continuously occupied Pauli's mind. It is an approximate value for a constant appearing in the fine structure theory of atomic spectra which in its theoretical expression ties together electromagnetism, relativity and quantum theory. Pauli saw the fine structure theory of spectra as a key in understanding the deepest contemporary problems of theoretical physics. For that reason the number 137 possessed a mysterious attraction for him.
— K. V. Laurikainen, Beyond the Atom: The Philosophical Thought of Wolfgang Pauli
The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant. ... An expanded form of the constant leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, ...
— Malcolm H. Mac Gregor, The Enigmatic Electron: A Doorway to Particle Masses
In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.
— Charles P. Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli
The measurement of human ability is in an infant state. Was it a requirement for the Wright Brothers to hold PhD’s before they could invent and take flight?
— Alastair Agutter, The Theory of Particle Matter Frequencies and Multiple Universes
The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward.
— Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.
— Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe
An idea sparked in the 1960s, a thought experiment, an amusing haiku, is now a thing of metal and glass.
— Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Light takes darkness vanish and worlds reappear. Light opens each day with a blaring overture, then throws its wands to earth and casts diamonds on lakes and oceans. Each night, lights tricks make the stars seem alive.
— Bruce Watson, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age
In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137:Bethe was mischievous with 137Bohr was intrigued by 137Born was mystified by 137Fermi was frisky with 137Feynman was mesmerized by 137Heisenberg was fascinated by 137Lederman was enchanted by 137Pauli was consumed by 137Turing was matched by 137
— Leon O Chua, A Nonlinear Dynamics Perspective of Wolfram's New Kind of Science :(Volume VI): 85
Quite obviously, a theoretical determination of the numerical value of α would signify great progress in our understanding of fundamental interactions. Many physicists have tried to find it, but without significant success to this day. Richard Feynman, the theory wizard of Caltech in Pasadena, once suggested that every one of his theory colleagues should write on the blackboard in his office: 137 -- how shamefully little we understand!
— Harald Fritzsch, Elementary Particles: Building Blocks of Matter
Calculate the fine structure constant from first principles.
— David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.
— Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
We can measure the fine structure constant with very great precision, but so far none of our theories has provided an explanation of its measured value. One of the aims of superstring theory is to predict this quantity precisely. Any theory that could do that would be taken very seriously indeed as a potential 'Theory of Everything'.
— John D. Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits
There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government.
— Willem Witteveen, The Great Pyramid of Giza: A Modern View on Ancient Knowledge
... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.
— Wolfgang Pauli, Theory of Relativity
As relates to life on Earth, the fine structure constant determines how solar radiation is absorbed in our atmosphere, and it also applies to how photosynthesis works in plants.
— Deepak Chopra & Menas C. Kafatos, You Are the Universe
The laws of physics could be like an onion, with new laws becoming operational as we probe new scales. We simply don't know!
— Richard Feynman
We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.
— Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow
True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.
— Sheldon L. Glashow, Charm of Physics: Collected Essays of Sheldon Glashow
To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.
— Steven Weinberg, Shelter Island II: Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics
In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.
— Marja de Vries, The Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the existence and operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio
Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.
— Silvan S. Schweber, Qed and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga
God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).
— Paul Davies
Joe’s scientific life is defined by these significant near misses… He was Shackleton many times, almost the first: almost the first to see the big bang, almost the first to patent the laser, almost the first to detect gravitational waves. Famous for nearly getting there.
— Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Universe is the smallest clock.
— Vivake Pathak
The knowledge of the soul is knowledge of the universe
— Alexis Karpouzos, Cosmology: Philosophy & Physics
Don't confound static electricity with ecstatic eccentricity. One will leave your hair up, the other will live up in the air!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual
What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.'Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—''Purely hypothetical—''—time travelers.''So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?
— Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics.
— Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.
— Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
There should be no boundary to human endeavor.
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant. If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing (University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube)
— Gary Taubes
The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.
— James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn
It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.
— Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics
Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.
— Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
Oppenheimer’s theorizing was so startlingly original — so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research — that his colleagues’ ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved.
— Algis Valiunas
Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled "electricity" stuff. His apocryphal reply: "I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it".
— Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.Yes, very bad.
— James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate
That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.
— Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values.
— Edward Witten
[..] when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict.
— Frank Wilczek, Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics
Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II
Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics.
— Henri Poincaré
I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ...Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, ....January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer.February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: "A revelation!"March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: "I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work."September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's "indefatigable efforts.
— Abraham Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World
The shortest path is not always the fastest.
— Ali AlJa'bari
The shortest path is no always the fastest.
— Ali AlJa'bari
But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the "fine-structure constant," .... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.
— John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
Following the path of earlier unificationists, one of Eddington's aims was to reduce the contingencies in the description of nature, for example, by explaining the fundamental constants of physics rather than accepting them as merely experimental data. One of these constants was the fine-structure constant ..., which entered prominently in Dirac's theory and was known to be about 1/137.
— Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
Some astrophysicists have convinced themselves that the fifth significant figure of the fine structure constant has changed over the past ten billion years.
— Sheldon L. Glashow
The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant, a ~ 1/137, as manifested in the factor-of-137 spacings between the classical electron radius, electron Compton radius, and Bohr orbit radius. ... An a-quantized mass-generation grid extends accurately from the electron all the way to the top quark t, and leads to a corresponding a-quantized particle lifetime grid.
— Malcolm H. Mac Gregor, The Enigmatic Electron: A Doorway to Particle Masses
As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.
— Emilio Segrè, From X Rays To Quarks: Modern Physicists And Their Discoveries
It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics.
— Feynman, Richard