“In the process, we might remember that the ground state, the vacuum state of our world, doesn't display all the symmetries of the laws of nature either. Our relation to the universe is similar to that of the magnet-dwellers to… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“Recall our discussion of the pendulum. Its position at a given instant does not fix its subsequent behavior. Suppose a photograph shows the pendulum… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“Just as with sound waves, light waves emitted by a moving source show the Doppler effect. What we observe instead of the sound pitch… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“The interpretation of apparent long-distance action by means of continuously propagating effects was vigorously asserted by Isaac Newton. In his wake, the interpretation of… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“The quantity that physicists call the specific heat of a substance is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“To gain any intuitive understanding of the breakdown of this ultimate symmetry through vacuum effects at the critical 10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang,… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“To illustrate this relation, think of a game of table tennis. As the ball hits the table, it will bounce up and down. When… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“Before the particles that we observe today materialized, all matter in the early universe must have gone through this stage of a quark-gluon soup,… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“In physics terms, the reason for symmetry breaking is the instability of the symmetric state.” — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“What really transcends our understanding is the mechanism that permits these oscillations of abstract field quantities to carry energy. We know this is true;… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“Chaotic or disordered distributions are symmetrical on the average. An observer cannot conclude anything about his location from looking around him. An example is… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“The hotter a substance, the faster and the less ordered its molecular motion, and the larger the momentum with which molecules collide. Above 0… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
“This elementary process is symbolically illustrated in figure 59c: A photon becomes an electron-positron pair; inversely, an electron and a positron can combine into… — Henning Genz Copy Share Image
