A Neutron Quotes & Sayings

Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. — Mark Steyn

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it? — Michael Cunningham

Toward the end of the Cold War, capitalism created a military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon that destroys life while leaving buildings intact. During the Fourth World War, however, a new wonder has been discovered: the financial bomb. Unlike those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb not only destroys the polis (here, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery on those who live there, but also transforms its target into just another piece in the puzzle of economic globalization. — Subcomandante Marcos

It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. — Martin Rees

How do I know that a table still exists if I go out of the room and can't see it? What does it mean to say that things we can't see, such as electrons or quarks - the particles that are said to make up the proton and neutron - exist? One could have a model in which the table disappears when I leave the room and reappears in the same position when I come back, but that would be awkward, and what if something happened when I was out, like the ceiling falling in? How, under the table-disappears-when-I-leave-the-room model, could I account for the fact that the next time I enter, the table reappears broken, under the debris of the ceiling? The model in which the table stays put is much simpler and agrees with observation. That is all one can ask. — Stephen Hawking

Now I've got nothing left to lose
You take your time to choose
I can tell you now without a trace of fear

That my love will be forever
And we'll die we'll die together
Lie, I will never
'Cause our love will be forever"
~Neutron Star Collision (Love is Forever) — Matthew J. Bellamy

The neutron warhead is a defensive weapon designed to offset the great superiority that the Soviet Union has on the western front against the NATO nations. — Ronald Reagan

[Joffe], during a visit to Russia, complained to his KGB handler about the awful coffee. The KGB dude replied that it was really the Kremlin's answer to America's neutron bomb -- both killed people but left the building intact.

"I was then that I first saw this vision,"said Joffe. Bad coffee equals expansionism, imperialism, and war; good coffee drips with civility and pacifism and lassitude... — Stewart Lee Allen

A neutron walks into a bar and asks, "How much for a beer?" The bartender replies, "For you? No charge. — Various

O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each. — Lise Meitner

The key to a good life is to balance the good and evil rather than trying to get rid of all evils because if you get rid of all your evils, you would also lose all your desire and ability to do good. In other words, you become neutral like neutron and become useless for the self and the society. — Awdhesh Singh

The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes ... lifeless echoes of their former majesty. — Jake Vander Ark

A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, one of each color. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark; a neutron contains two down and one up. — Stephen Hawking

I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated. — Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

(The neutron is a bit of a drama queen.) — Sean Carroll

The discovery of the neutron was a crucial step in understanding nuclei, including radioactive ones. For example, beta decays are the transformation within a nucleus of a nucleon of one type, either a proton or a neutron, to the other. You may wonder how a proton can decay to a neutron if the neutron is heavier than the proton; conservation of energy would seem to make this impossible. However, while a proton not bound in a nucleus cannot transform to a neutron, it is possible in some circumstances for a proton within a nucleus to do so. This is because the proton can use the additional energy from the force that binds nucleons in the nucleus. Beta decay occurs if it results in the total energy of the final atom, taking into account the energy due to binding, being lower that that of the initial atom. The same applies to a neutron bound in a nucleus, whereas a free neutron can always decay to a proton. — Brian R. Martin

One proton of faith, three electrons of humility, a neutron of compassion and a bond of honesty," Robert said, winking at his daughter. "What's that?" Cora frowned, confused. Maggie laughed. "That, according to your father, is the molecular structure of love. — Menna Van Praag

That one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs billions of tonnes, — Holly Smale

He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing. — Arthur C. Clarke

With what moral authority can [the US] speak of human rights ... the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; where the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated ... Where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings. — Fidel Castro

I felt like a punk who'd gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb.
"Screwed again", I thought. "What good's a neutron bomb in a streetfight? — William Gibson

English fondness for France is normally a sort of neutron love: take away the people and leave the buildings standing. — Anthony Lane

In the tail above the giant resonance, you can get not just one neutron emitted but two, three, four or five, and so there are a lot of things one can measure, looking at the competition with the emission of neutrons and protons and so on. — John Henry Carver

There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was 'style' and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a 'style' that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators. — John Ashworth Ratcliffe

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms. — Bill Bryson

With all reserve we advance the view that a supernova represents the transition of an ordinary star into a neutron star consisting mainly of neutrons. Such a star may possess a very small radius and an extremely high density. As neutrons can be packed much more closely than ordinary nuclei and electrons, the gravitational packing energy in a cold neutron star may become very large, and under certain conditions may far exceed the ordinary nuclear packing fractions ... — Fritz Zwicky

Just because there are celebrities in a movie, it doesn't mean anything. I don't think The Ant Bully did all that well the first week at the box office. Compare the movies that have a lot of celebrities with the Jimmy Neutron movie, which had no celebrity voices and grossed almost one hundred million dollars. — Rob Paulsen

The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%. — Bill Gates

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. — Don DeLillo

To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die. Help — Alexander Chee