Condensed Matter Physics Quotes

The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.

The result was not nearly as vivid to the layman as, say, E=mc2. Yet using the condensed notations of tensors, in which sprawling complexities can be compressed into little subscripts, the crux of the final Einstein field equations is compact enough to be emblazoned, as it indeed often has been, on T-shirts designed for proud physics students. In one of its many variations,82 it can be written as: Rμv– 1/2 gμv R = 8πTμv The left side of the equation starts with the term Rμv, which is the Ricci tensor he had embraced earlier. The term gμv is the all-important metric tensor, and the term R is the trace of the Ricci tensor called the Ricci scalar. Together, this left side of the equation—which is now known as the Einstein tensor and can be written simply as Gμv—compresses together all of the information about how the geometry of spacetime is warped and curved by objects. The right side describes the movement of matter in the gravitational field. The interplay between the two sides shows how objects curve spacetime and how, in turn, this curvature affects the motion of objects. As the physicist John Wheeler has put it, “Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move.”83 Thus is staged a cosmic tango, as captured by another physicist, Brian Greene: Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter, and energy.

The first forms she manifests are extremely subtle. They are worlds consisting of light and awareness, populated by beings with bodies far too subtle to be seen with human eyes. At this stage, the veils that hide the creation from its source are nearly transparent. By the time Shakti has condensed herself into the various universes of physical energy and matter, the illusion of separation has become so thick that it is impossible to penetrate with the naked eye.

The Sixteen Conclusions of Reverend Kirk In the last half of the seventeenth century, a Scottish scholar gathered all the accounts he could find about the Sleagh Maith and, in 1691, wrote an amazing manuscript entitled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. It was the first systematic attempt to describe the methods and organization of the strange creatures that plagued the farmers of Scotland. The author, Reverend Kirk, of Aberfoyle, studied theology at St. Andrews and took his degree of professor at Edinburgh. Later he served as minister for the parishes of Balquedder and Aberfoyle and died in 1692. Kirk invented the name "the Secret Commonwealth" to describe the organization of the elves. It is impossible to quote the entire text of his treatise, but we can summarize his findings about elves and other aerial creatures in the following way: 1. They have a nature that is intermediate between man and the angels. 2. Physically, they have very light and fluid bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will. 3. Intellectually, they are intelligent and curious. 4. They have the power to carry away anything they like. 5. They live inside the earth in caves, which they can reach through any crevice or opening where air passes. 6. When men did not inhabit most of the world, the creatures used to live there and had their own agriculture. Their civilization has left traces on the high mountains; it was flourishing at a time when the whole countryside was nothing but woods and forests. 7. At the beginning of each three-month period, they change quarters because they are unable to stay in one place. Besides, they like to travel. It is then that men have terrible encounters with them, even on the great highways. 8. Their chameleon-like bodies allow them to swim through the air with all their household. 9. They are divided into tribes. Like us, they have children, nurses, marriages, burials, etc., unless they just do this to mock our own customsor to predict terrestrial events. 10. Their houses are said to be wonderfully large and beautiful, but under most circumstances they are invisible to human eyes. Kirk compares them to enchanted islands. The houses are equipped with lamps that burn forever and fires that need no fuel. 11. They speak very little. When they do talk among themselves, their language is a kind of whistling sound. 12. Their habits and their language when they talk to humans are similar to those of local people. 13. Their philosophical system is based on the following ideas: nothing dies; all things evolve cyclically in such a way that at every cycle they are renewed and improved. Motion is the universal law. 14. They are said to have a hierarchy of leaders, but they have no visible devotion to God, no religion. 15. They have many pleasant and light books, but also serious and complex books dealing with abstract matters. 16. They can be made to appear at will before us through magic. The similarities between these observations and the story related by Facius Cardan, which antedates Kirk's manuscript by exactly two hundred years, are clear. Both Cardan and Paracelsus write, like Kirk, that a pact can be made with these creatures and that they can be made to appear and answer questions at will. Paracelsus did not care to reveal what that pact was "because of the ills that might befall those who would try it." Kirk is equally discreet on this point. And, of course, to go deeper into this matter would open the whole field of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, which is beyond my purpose in the present book.

The fine-structure constant is ubiquitous throughout physics. I’ve already noted its connection to the electromagnetic interaction. In atomic physics, the binding energy, fine-structure splitting, and Lamb shift are all proportional to powers of α. In condensed matter physics, α characterizes Josephson junction oscillations and quantum Hall resistance steps. In addition, α is an important component of our system of fundamental constants. [Physics Today]