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...a...
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 - parti...
Une with diffraction, just as if we let a thousand
If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . .
Nothing is real unless it is observed
Earth as our home in space, a single blue-white oasis of life surrounded by a black desert.
From this, says Schrödinger, I learned many things, but not religion. His favourite question was, Sir, do you really believe that?
The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside
Every problem in quantum physics had to be first solved using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning.
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, for itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common tim...
As I understood it, what really mattered was simply that some systems (‘system’ is just a jargon word for anything, like a swinging pendulum, or the Solar System, or water dripping from a tap) are ver...
It is not the way of science to sit idly back and hope that someone will come up with a better answer to our problems. In the absence of a better answer, we have to face up to the implications of the...
Action, and there are also structures so distinct from the rest of the cell ‘jelly’, like cells within cells, that the best explanation of their presence is that that is indeed what they are. These se...
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein
The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the...
Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron, he said, and our bes...
El destino al que está abocado cualquier especialista de cualquier área de la ciencia es ceñirse cada vez más estrechamente al tema de su especialidad, aprendiendo cada vez más sobre cada vez menos ma...
These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton’s laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second...
The Big Bang was not the beginning of the Universe.
It isn't just that Bohr's atom with its electron orbits is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave l...