Modern Physics Quotes & Sayings

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God - primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian - even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth — Dan Simmons

Through Jung [Pauli] became very interested in various kinds of mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. This led Pauli to develop a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the world's greatest authority in that field and in the Cabala, .... On one occasion Scholem asked me to tell him about unsolved problems in modern physics. .... When I mentioned this number --137-- to Scholem, .... He told me that in Hebrew .... The number corresponding to the word 'cabala' happens to be 137. — Victor F. Weisskopf

The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a universe made out of energy, everything is entangled; everything is one. — Bruce Lipton

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

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter. — C. V. Raman

As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. — Arthur Koestler

Yo-yo (Tagalog for "come back") evolved from a Philippine hunting tool made from a softball-size stone tied to a length of plant vine or a leather thong which enabled throwers to retrieve the weapon with a simple flick of the wrist (Hoffman 1996). The modern yo-yo thus has a great deal of physics, prehistory, and hunting lore encoded in its maple, beech, or plastic form (see below, Neuro-notes III). — David B. Givens

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind. — Terence McKenna

And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry.
And — Charles Taylor

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Modern physics has changed nothing in the great classical disciplines of, for instance, mechanics, optics, and heat. Only the conception of hitherto unexplored regions, formed prematurely from a knowledge of only certain parts of the world, has undergone a decisive transformation. This conception, however, is always decisive for the future course of research. — Werner Heisenberg

The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it — Fritjof Capra

The fact that modern physics, the manifestation of an extreme specialization of the rational mind, is now making contact with mysticism, the essence of religion and manifestation of an extreme specialization of the intuitive mind, shows very beautifully the unity and complementary nature of the rational and intuitive modes of consciousness; of the yang and the yin. — Fritjof Capra

The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where - as modern physics tells us - even empty space is curved. — Fritjof Capra

The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect. — Yuri Milner

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 only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. — Robert M. Pirsig

The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck. — Ken Wilber

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus ... — Celia Green

"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality. — Ken Wilber

always been lauded as containing the secrets of cosmogenesis. Raja Roy in his remarkable book shows how this is true not only from the yogic vison but according to the latest insights of modern physics. The book takes the reader on a vast panoramic journey through the universe of — Raja Ram Mohan Roy

If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD — Lee Strobel

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it's a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?49 — John C. Lennox

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. — Werner Heisenberg

Ever since the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had first reached him in California, Brecht had connected Galileo's caving-in before the Inquisition as the great and perhaps ineradicable moral blot on the history of physics and the developments in modern physics that led to the atomic and hydrogen bombs. — John Fuegi

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values. — Werner Heisenberg

In modern physics, the universe is experienced as a dynamic inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way. — Fritjof Capra

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching. — Bill Bryson

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable. — Martin Heidegger

The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy. — Gary Zukav

I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle. — Lewis Thomas

Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines. — Steve Keen

There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly. — Evgeny Morozov

The body thinks it's real. That's the problem of modern physics. How to convince our minds that they're not our own. — Dominic Smith

Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal. — Ian McEwan

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller's (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli's
mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher's stone of the mathematical universe.
This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung's collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy] — Todd Hayen

Religion and science, for example, are often thought to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists. Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference. — Jonathan Haidt

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe. — Fritjof Capra

No one must think that Newton's great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this [Theory of Relativity] or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built. — Albert Einstein

If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: 'Be comforted, you and they shall live again.' — Frank Tipler

In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph. — Louis Pasteur

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. — Peter Shaffer

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

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons - to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.
One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place. — Henry Enfield Roscoe

Pragmatism , in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt. — Max Horkheimer

Science may explain the world, but we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us — Paul Davies

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics. — Sean Carroll

Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era. — Daniel Kleppner

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

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. — Michael Crichton

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question
such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?
not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had. — C.P. Snow

Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics. — Lord Kelvin

All of modern physics is governed by that magnificent and thoroughly confusing discipline called quantum mechanics ... It has survived all tests and there is no reason to believe that there is any flaw in it. We all know how to use it and how to apply it to problems; and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it. — Murray Gell-Mann

The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan. — Fritjof Capra

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics. — Stephen Hawking

Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist. — Walther Bothe

Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune but not the player. Trinculo might have been referring to modern physics in the words: 'This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. — Robert Lanza

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense. — Edward Teller

Galileo - the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science. — Albert Einstein

Quantum physics forms the foundation of chemistry, explaining how molecules are held together. It describes how real solids and materials behave and how electricity is conducted through them ... It enabled the development of transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, LEDs, digital cameras and all the modern gadgetry that surrounds us. — Neil Turok

In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy. — Richard Morris

In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities. — Richard P. Feynman

Riemann concluded that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the crumpling of our three-dimensional universe in the unseen fourth dimension. Thus a "force" has no independent life of its own; it is only the apparent effect caused by the distortion of geometry. By introducing the fourth spatial dimension, Riemann accidentally stumbled on what would become one of the dominant themes in modern theoretical physics, that the laws of nature appear simple when expressed in higher-dimensional space. He then set about developing a mathematical language in which this idea could be expressed. — Michio Kaku

I do find that Western medicine is more and more open to proving energetic concepts. Why not, because modern physics is 100 percent based on it. — Deborah King

Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat. — David Bentley Hart

If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity. — Arthur Koestler

The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science. — Werner Heisenberg

Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics. — Fritjof Capra

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. — Wolfgang Pauli

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world. — Bill Gaede

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. — Francis Crick

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events. — Taner Edis

the most sophisticated diagnostic equipment available in the world, which detects and measures energies and frequencies in the body. This diagnostic equipment includes devices you probably heard of like MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography), CAT scans (Computed Axial Tomography), EEGs (Electro encephalograms), EKGs (Electrocardiography), ultrasound devices and more. Our medical system diagnoses the body energetically with modern physics (Quantum Field Theory), and then treats with drugs and surgery (Newtonian Science). What is wrong with this picture? — Bryant A. Meyers

Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent. — Brian Greene

The specific and unique presupposition for experimentation is, as remarkable as it may sound, that science become rational-mathematical, i.e., in the highest sense, not experimental. Initial positing of nature as such. Because modern "science" (physics) is mathematical (not empirical), it is necessarily experimental in — Martin Heidegger

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story. — C.S. Lewis

The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. — Alfred North Whitehead

We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense of the world around us. And all of these elements lie at the core of modern physics. The story is among the grandest
the unfolding of the entire universe; the mystery is among the toughest
finding out how the cosmos came to be; the odds are among the most daunting
bipeds, newly arrived by cosmic time scales trying to reveal the secrets of the ages; and the quest is among the deepest
the search for fundamental laws to explain all we see and beyond, from the tiniest particles to the most distant galaxies. — Brian Greene

But why can't we just order what we need? Or buy it?"
Myrnin flicked the silver ring on his right hand into the bars of his cell, setting up a metallic ringing. "None of that. Modern children are fools, slaves to the work of others, dependent for everything. Not you. You will learn how to build your tools as well as use them."
"You want me to be an engineer?"
"Is it not a useful thing for one who studies physics to understand such practical applications?"
She stared at him doubtfully. "You're not going to make me get an anvil and make my own screwdrivers or anything, are you?"
Myrnin smiled slowly. "What a good idea! I'll consider it. — Rachel Caine

Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists ... Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. — Fritjof Capra

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Modern physics is describing what the ancient wisdom keepers of the Americas have long known. These shamans, known as 'the Earthkeepers,' say that we're dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we're only able to do this in the very small subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses. — Alberto Villoldo

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. — Robert Lanza

Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science. — Matthew Stewart

Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses. But the spectacular success of modern physics, which is based upon concepts such as Feynman's that clash with everyday experience, has shown that that is not the case. The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics. — Stephen Hawking

In another time, we called them miraculous healings and left the scientific community out of it when they didn't have the capacity to understand what was really going on. But today, what if I were to tell you that the science for quantum healing is available and that this knowledge makes perfect sense according to the views of modern quantum physics? Not only that, but we can teach you a step-by-step approach to make these events more likely to occur. — Paul Drouin

In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'." — Arthur Eddington

Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of astrophysicists who have gotten their main knowledge from these textbooks. Earthbound and space telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory. — Hannes Alfven