“By reversing the steps that we took to advance from the concept of substance to that of Materia Prima, we can imagine building up our universe: the homogeneous basic substance, Materia Prima, contains all the possibilities that the laws of… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“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 all forces or propagation of information over long distances in terms of hidden short-distance effects with finite velocity of propagation is one of the most challenging tasks of fundamental research in physics. We know that oscillations… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“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, we will have to resort to examples in the space of our experience. Starting at that critical instant, gravity assumes a part of its own, distinct from the other three forces; these remain unified up to… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“To illustrate this relation, think of a game of table tennis. As the ball hits the table, it will bounce up and down. When we restrain the upward bounce by holding the paddle parallel to the table at a small height, the ball will bounce up and down at a faster rate between paddle and table. If the paddle, the… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“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; our relevant equations say so, and the solar energy collectors prove it. A photoelectric cell registers at this instant an energy that left the Sun, in the form of light, some eight minutes ago. Travelling across… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“Chaotic or disordered distributions are symmetrical on the average. An observer cannot conclude anything about his location from looking around him. An example is the chaotic disposition of sand grains at the beach, or of flecks of light on a television screen when the station closes down. In the chaotic distribution, no location or direction is preferred. Only when there… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“The hotter a substance, the faster and the less ordered its molecular motion, and the larger the momentum with which molecules collide. Above 0 degrees Celsius, the water molecules collide so frequently and so violently that no structure can appear or be sustained. Should there be somewhere in the water a small piece of ice, it's molecules will be rent… — Henning Genz Copy Share
“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 a photon (or as we said above, annihilate into a photon). But for the process to take place, we need a fourth particle as a catalyst. In the cloud chamber picture in figure 12, the catalyst… — Henning Genz Copy Share
