“The Higgs field originated as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang-a bit like the crystallization of ice as water cools down. We have already argued that just as ice crystals form an ordered structure, so does the effect… — 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 hanging straight down. This may mean either of two things: The pendulum is at rest, or it is in the process of oscillating through its lowest point. In the first case, it will remain in the… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“Just as with sound waves, light waves emitted by a moving source show the Doppler effect. What we observe instead of the sound pitch is the color of the light: Red light has a lower frequency than blue light. If the light source is moving toward the observer, the light appears bluer; as it moves away, it will appear red.… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“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
