Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.
Any person, brought into the presence of this fact, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.
As to the effect of the wave on the air, we will suppose the water to be quite flat and the air motionless, a heavy undulation comes on the scene, it has to pass, so it pushes the air up with its face, letting it fall again as its back glides onwards...
Common sense steps in here and says: Separate the parts you want to be mobile from the parts you want to be inert. You have seen the result, and I know many have the skill to apply it.
I do theoretical particle physics. We're trying to understand the most basic structure of matter. And the way you do that is you have to look at really small distances. And to get to small distances, you need high energies.
There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe...
It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally. One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space ...
An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.
I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.
Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? And, you know, everybody has their own idea about what it is, but there's no coherent final consensus on why there is space.
There are just hundreds of people that have inspired and influenced me in a number of different ways. First of all, you can't forget your parents and all they've done to help you to get here.
Certein bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.
Of course we have Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but in many ways we are a kind of republic. We don't have royals in Australia, so it was kind of unusual to run into those kind of people. But aside from that it was quite ordinary.
I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity.
Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial c...
If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That's the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there's a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy to...
You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.
It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.
Of course, a single verse of the Holy Qur'an or a hadith moves the faithful to good actions, but volumes of books would not move an unwilling person who is like an ass carrying a load of books.
If diffraction or interference phenomena were to be sought it was therefore necessary, in accordance with the basic principles of wave theory, to select for the test arrangement far smaller decisive dimensions than those employed in corresponding tes...
For both reasons, owing to the thermal motion and to the working together of various wavelengths, factors arise which, in a similar manner to the structural factor, exert some influence upon the brightness of the interference points but not upon thei...
