Christophe Galfard Quotes & Sayings

A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist. — Christophe Galfard

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body. — Christophe Galfard

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. — Christophe Galfard

Everyone should be very grateful radioactivity exists at all. It can kill you, yes, but without it you wouldn't have been born in the first place. On Earth, deep under your feet, our planet happens to contain many atoms that do decay, all the time. Less so now than in the past, but still, Earth's mantle is radioactive. When atoms decay there, the particles they emit bump into their neighbours and generate heat, the very heat that contributes to keeping our planet warm. Without radioactivity, there would be no seismic or volcanic activity. The surface of the Earth would have been dead cold billions of yeras ago. Life as we know it would probably not exist at all. — Christophe Galfard

Even today, more than eighty years after Oort's bold guess, we still don't have a clue what this dark matter is made of. We know it exists. We know where it is. We have maps of its presence within and around galaxies throughout the universe. We even have stringent constraints on what it is not, but we have no clue what it is. And yes, its presence is overwhelming: for every one kilogram of ordinary matter made out of neutrons and protons and electrons, there are five kilograms of dark matter, made out of who-knows-what. — Christophe Galfard

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. — Christophe Galfard