Particle Wave Quotes & Sayings

Truth is:
I was always that kind of girl.
Truth is:
they don't make dresses any whiter than
mine.
Truth is:
I am not Demeter's daughter.
I am Heisenberg's ripe tomato
I am Niels Bohr's piece on the side.
In the winter I am a particle.
In the summer I am a wave.
And I didn't get to be queen of hell
by letting folks off easy. — Catherynne M Valente

The fortunate one uses the instrument of deep meditation and probes deep into his heart. Then the waves of love gain the depth of the ocean, and the ocean of love flows and fills the heart and thrills every particle of being. Every wave of life then flows in the fullness of love, in the fullness of divine glory, in the fullness of grace, in bliss and peace. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

It is a fascinating fact that father and son have given the most striking evidence for the apparently contradictory properties of the electron: the father proving its character as a particle, the son its character as a wave ... Thomson was extremely proud of his son's success and tried to assimilate the new results into his old convictions. — Max Born

Like the very quantum particles we study, we must be comfortable allowing our view of the world to exist in superposition. — Kevin Michel

And then I was offered the job of a particle in factory physics. I was offered the job of an electron in an office atom. I was offered the job of a frequency for a radio station. People told me I could easily make it as a ray in a ray gun. What's the matter with you, don't you want to do well? I wanted to be a beach bum and work on my wave function. I have always loved the sea. — Jeanette Winterson

What appears to us solid is ultimately both a particle and a wavelength, and on that realm everything behaves as both a particle and a wave. — Vanna Bonta

White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle. — Chaim Potok

The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society. — Alain Aspect

Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times? — Thomm Quackenbush

Now, since the time of Newton there had been a debate about whether light was a wave
that is, a traveling disturbance in some background medium
or a particle, which travels regardless of the presence of a background medium. The observation of Maxwell that electromagnetic waves must exist and that their speed was identical to that of light ended the debate: light was an electromagnetic wave. — Lawrence M. Krauss

I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. — Neil Gaiman

I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave. — Alan Arkin

The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave. — Leonard Cohen

Mystics have spoken to us through the ages in terms of paradox. Is it possible that we are beginning to see a meeting ground between science and religion? When we are able to say that "a human is both mortal and eternal at the same time" and "light is both a wave and a particle at the same time," we have begun to speak the same language. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth that — M. Scott Peck

No phenomenon directly involving a frequency has yet been detected above approximately 10^12 cycles per second. We only deduce the higher frequencies from the energy of the particles, by a rule which assumes that the particle-wave idea of quantum mechanics is valid. — Richard Feynman

We are a manifestation that we perpetuate through space-time. Death is the ceasing of the observation of it whether by direct or indirect influence. — Solange Nicole

Let me repeat: Observe a particle as a wave, and it is a wave. Observe it as matter, and it is matter ... Thus it is our point of view, the way we look at reality that makes reality the way it is. — Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes. — John Kessel

Love was actually more like calculus or physics. What was the half-life of love? Did it have cosigns and slopes, or quarks that morphed from wave to particle faster than you could say, please don't leave? — Trebor Healey

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach. — Margaret Wertheim

How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it "a wavelike question" and it appears as a particle if you ask it "a particle-like question." This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.
And it's not so much true, as our cultural debates presume, that science and religion reach contradictory answers to the same particular questions of human life. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone. — Krista Tippett

Light is a particle and a wave. This is hard to understand, how a thing can be two things at once. But a woman is also both a particle and a wave. She's a wave when you see her reach down to pull a shell from the sea, and you feel her beauty pass through you like electrical current. She's a particle when her hair brushes your face, and her hands push into yours — Ken Kalfus

When physicists create a mathematical model of a physical process, they rely on the mathematical framework that can represent that process as closely as possible. When Newton developed a model of forces and motion, the appropriate mathematical framework was calculus. When Einstein developed a model of wave-particle motion, he relied on the mathematics of wave equations and eigenvalues. For many models in scientific computation, the computational framework that best aligns with our need is object orientation. — Anthony Scopatz

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 ... all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else. — John Gribbin

It's good to know wave and particle alpha code, but more than that, the writer must go to the heart of life ... — John Geddes

I hope you discover that love is both a feeling and an action, like light is both a particle and a wave. — Iain S. Thomas

The proton in the nucleus cannot make a wave by particle motion. — Mark Fennell

You are all wave particles when I close my eyes. I am no more entranced by your entanglement than a butterfly is to a bee. — Solange Nicole

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr's solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time. — Richard E. Nisbett

Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). — Bruce H. Lipton

But dividing the mind into "biological" and "psychological" is as fallacious as classifying light as a particle or a wave. The natural world makes no promise to align itself with preconceptions that humans find parsimonious or convenient. (167) — Thomas Lewis

Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities. — Robin Wasserman

The dividing line between the wave or particle nature of matter and radiation is the moment "Now." As this moment steadily advances through time it coagulates a wavy future into a particle past. — William Lawrence Bragg

She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave. — Manu Joseph

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being. — Madeleine L'Engle

It was the discovery of the quantum universe that changed everything, and that universe was so small and so dynamic that it could not be observed directly. Trying to explain their insights, scientists looked at the language of mysticism. At the subatomic level, the parallels between quantum reality and mysticism were striking. For example, the behavior of light: in some contexts it acted like a wave, in others like a particle. Could it be both? Physicists had no concept for grasping this, so they dispensed with Western logic and embraced paradox. (This is important, too, for the notion of vampires being both living and dead.) — Katherine Ramsland

There is a cosmic "entanglement" between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web. Entangled particles are somewhat like twins still joined by an umbilical cord (their wave function) which can be light-years across. What happens to one member automatically affects the other, and hence knowledge concerning one particle can instantly reveal knowledge about its pair. Entangled pairs act as if they were a single object, although they may be separated by a large distance. — Michio Kaku

If Feynman could see beauty as the inspiration for the theory of the rainbow, and if an electron could behave like a wave, and light like a particle, then the little contradiction of Leonard flitting among different subfields of physics, or even among varied careers, would not shake the universe. — Anonymous

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox ... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together. — Joan Jett

The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. — Ibrahim Ibrahim