Zwicky Quotes

Love, I'm pretty sure, is light.

Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives, but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly.

Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.

One of the reasons I think we are sometimes critical of support for the arts is that art — lyric art in particular — can make us uncomfortably aware that economically expedient answers may not always be true.

To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker. [Diary entry, 1971]

Swiss-American astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky.

My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, John Barton, Barry Dempster, Carolyn Forché and Elizabeth Philips for their masterful eyes and minds.

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky’s “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

dark matter,” which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky,

that's what I wanted: words made of that: language / that could bend light.

When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky’s work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky’s deductions concerning dark matter wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period.

Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn’t nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn’t escape its immense gravitational pull. You would have a black hole. Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice

Supernovae are significant to us in one other decidedly central way. Without them we wouldn’t be here. You will recall the cosmological conundrum with which we ended the first chapter—that the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements. Those came later, but for a very long time nobody could figure out how they came later. The problem was that you needed something really hot—hotter even than the middle of the hottest stars—to forge carbon and iron and the other elements without which we would be distressingly immaterial. Supernovae provided the explanation, and it was an English cosmologist almost as singular in manner as Fritz Zwicky who figured it out.

To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.

In the early 1930s a Swiss astronomer called Fritz Zwicky was studying galaxy clusters through the telescopes of the California Institute of Technology when he noticed an anomaly of extraordinary implications. Clusters are groups of gravitationally bound galaxies, and Zwicky’s work involved measuring the speeds of revolution of individual galaxies in their orbits around the core of the cluster, in order to weigh the cluster as a whole. What Zwicky observed was that the galaxies were revolving much faster than expected, especially towards the outer reaches of the cluster. At such speeds, individual galaxies should have broken their gravitational hold on one another, dispersing the cluster. There was, Zwicky determined, only one possible explanation. There had to be another source of gravity, powerful enough to hold the cluster together given the speeds of revolution of the observable bodies. But what could supply such huge gravitational field strength, sufficient to tether whole galaxies – and why could he not see this ‘missing mass’? Zwicky found no answers to his questions, but in asking them he began a hunt that continues today. His ‘missing mass’ is now known as ‘dark matter’ – and proving its existence and determining its qualities is one of the grail-quests of modern physics

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that “the way that Prince’s music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he’s sitting down at the drums, he’s derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that’s a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he’s thinking about James Brown’s horn player, on one aspect; and when he’s playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it’s not rock, it’s not funk, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues—it’s just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I’m thinking ‘He can’t play that, that’s Gary Newman.’ And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks ‘Do you like Gary Newman?’ And I said ‘You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.’ And he said ‘There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is.

The universe is so unique and perfect that it could not have originated by chance but was divined by flawless, creative design. Fritz Zwicky to youngest daughter, Barbarina Zwicky

Where will my soul go when it can't walk among them? When the earth I have loved turns its back and closes its eyes. I will lie down, then, in the wreckage of meaning. In the rot of the forest, the rot of the wind. I will lie down in the shouting and silence, the dust of you filling my mouth.

Because she was a woman she'd been raped. Because she was a woman there was no excuse. Because she was a woman they dragged her to the pit. You can hear the dull snap as the bone breaks under flesh.

Though the nature of this missing mass was completely unknown, Zwicky gave the German name "dunkle materie" to the material, which translates to "dark matter". It is now believed that 90% of the mass of the Coma Cluster is in the form of dark matter. Unfortunately, Zwicky was a difficult man to get along with (he was dubbed "borderline psychopathic" in a BBC documentary Most Of Our Universe Is Missing, available on YouTube). Zwicky referred to his colleagues as "spherical bastards" — because they were bastards no matter which way you looked at them. As a result, Zwicky's work was ignored for many decades.