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

There were aging orange embers, blue dwarfs, twin yellow giants. There were collapsing neutron stars, and angry supernovae that hissed into the icy emptiness. There were borning stars, breathing stars, pulsing stars, and dying stars. There was the Death Star. At — George Lucas

The research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting. — James Rainwater

These stars marked the moments of the universe. There were aging orange embers, blue dwarfs, twin yellow giants. There were collapsing neutron stars, and angry supernovae that hissed into the icy emptiness. There were borning stars, breathing stars, pulsing stars, and dying stars. There was the Death Star. — George Lucas

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

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton. — Carlo Rubbia

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

If you take neutron star material outside of the crushing gravity well where it's normally found, it will re-expand into superhot normal matter with an outpouring of energy more powerful than any nuclear weapon. — Randall Munroe

One neutron bomb in the morning may just ruin your whole morning. — Rod Stewart

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

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

Anna took love very seriously. She loved love. No, worshipped, that's the word. She worshipped love. That was the only thing which had any place in her life. That and hatred. Do you know what neutron stars are?'
'They're planets with such compactness and high surface gravity that if I dropped this cigarette on one of them it would strike with the same force as an atom bomb. It was the same with Anna. Her gravitation to love-and hatred-was so strong that nothing could exist in the space between them. Every tiny detail caused an atomic explosion. Do you understand? It took me time to understand. She was like Jupiter-hidden behind an eternal cloud of sulphur. And humour. And sexuality. — Jo Nesbo

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

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

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

In Zechariah 14.. their flesh dissolves away, because of the plague hitting them for coming against the Jews in Jerusalem. When did that happen? I've never read when flesh dissolved; it can now, because of necrotizing fasciitis, or the neutron bomb, but not in 70AD. — Jack Van Impe

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

Alert Five Chikoya approaching, open assault formation. Multiple target acquisition. Armed Disruptor pulse. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire. U-shadow update: landing exit capsule behind Building-D. Armed Neutron lasers. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire. U-shadow update: decoy capsules on collision vector. Mach eight. Accelerating. Armed Microkinetics. Enhanced explosive warheads. Free fire authority. Armed Ariel smartseeker stealth mines. Chikoya profile loaded. Dispense. Alert New targets. — Peter F. Hamilton

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur. — Paul Davies

Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity. — R. Buckminster Fuller

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

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

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus. — Werner Heisenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel that the whole Western World will benefit by the resurrection of the neutron bomb project. — Ronald Reagan

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