"The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. ...the alleged effect ...would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time."

"Nothing in nature or the cosmos is ever completely still — as I write this, several wild Mallards have returned to the Museum courtyard and are creating a frantic spectacle of water and wings as they dive and attack in their annual spring ritual. Further from home, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 56 million light years from Earth has recently been observed to be spinning at close to the speed of light."

"The speed of light can never be reached. If it were reached, the outside observer would find that the ship had shrunk to zero length, had acquired an infinite mass, and was exerting an infinite force with its rocket motors. Astronauts inside the ship would observe no changes in themselves, but they would find the cosmos hurtling backward with the speed of light, cosmic time at a standstill, every star flattened to a disk and infinitely massive."

"If the ships could attain a relative speed equal to that of light, observers on each ship would think the other ship had shrunk to zero in length, acquired an infinite mass, and that time on the other ship had slowed to a full stop! If inertial mass did not vary in this way, then the steady application of force, such as the force supplied by rocket motors, could keep increasing a ship's velocity until it passed the speed of light. ...When the ship has contracted to one-tenth its rest length, its relativistic mass has become ten times as great. ...ten times as much force is required to produce the same increase in speed."

"Two ships are passing each other with uniform speed close to that of light. As they pass, a beam of light on the other ship is sent from the ceiling to the floor. There it strikes a mirror and is reflected back to the ceiling again. You will see the path of this light as a V [shape]. If you had sufficiently accurate instruments (of course no such instrument exists), you could clock the time it takes this light beam to traverse the V-shaped path. By dividing the length of the path by the time, you obtain the speed of light. ...an astronaut inside the other ship is doing the same thing [measuring his light beam's speed]. From his point of view... the light simply goes down and up along the same line, obviously a shorter distance than along the V that you observed. ...he also obtains the speed of light. ...But his light path is shorter. ...There is only one possible explanation: his clock is slower. Of course, the situation is perfectly symmetrical. If you send a beam down and up inside your ship, he will see its path as V-shaped. He will deduce that your clock is slower."

"In the special theory of relativity, the speed of light becomes... a new absolute. ...Regardless of the motion of its source, light always moves through space with the same constant speed."

"The strangest explanation was put forth by an Irish physicist, George Francis Fitzgerald. Perhaps, he said, the ether wind puts pressure on a moving object, causing it to shrink a bit in the direction of motion. To determine the length of a moving object, its length at rest must be multiplied by the following simple formula, in which \scriptstyle v^2 is the velocity of the object multiplied by itself, \scriptstyle c^2 is the velocity of light multiplied by itself: \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}. ...The speed of light in an unobtainable limit; when this is reached the formula becomes \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{c^2}{c^2}} which reduces to 0. ...In other words, if an object could obtain the speed of light, it would have no length at all in the direction of its motion!"

"For over 200 years the equations of motion enunciated by Newton were believed to describe nature correctly, and the first time that an error in these laws was discovered, the way to correct it was also discovered. Both the error and its correction were discovered by Einstein in 1905.Newton’s Second Law, which we have expressed by the equation F=\frac {d\left({mv}\right)}{dt} was stated with the tacit assumption that m is a constant, but we now know that this is not true, and that the mass of a body increases with velocity. In Einstein’s corrected formula m has the value m=\frac {{m}_}{\sqrt} where the “rest mass” m0 represents the mass of a body that is not moving and c is the speed of light, which is about 3×105 km⋅sec−1 or about 186,000 mi⋅sec−1."

"Another topic deserving discussion is Einstein’s modification of Newton’s law of gravitation. In spite of all the excitement it created, Newton’s law of gravitation is not correct! It was modified by Einstein to take into account the theory of relativity. According to Newton, the gravitational effect is instantaneous, that is, if we were to move a mass, we would at once feel a new force because of the new position of that mass; by such means we could send signals at infinite speed. Einstein advanced arguments which suggest that we cannot send signals faster than the speed of light, so the law of gravitation must be wrong. By correcting it to take the delays into account, we have a new law, called Einstein’s law of gravitation. One feature of this new law which is quite easy to understand is this: In the Einstein relativity theory, anything which has energy has mass—mass in the sense that it is attracted gravitationally. Even light, which has an energy, has a “mass.” When a light beam, which has energy in it, comes past the sun there is an attraction on it by the sun. Thus the light does not go straight, but is deflected. During the eclipse of the sun, for example, the stars which are around the sun should appear displaced from where they would be if the sun were not there, and this has been observed."

"When you are next out of doors on a summer night, turn your head towards the zenith. Almost vertically above you will be shining the brightest star of the northern skies—Vega of the Lyre, twenty-six years away at the speed of light, near enough to the point of no return for us short-lived creatures. Past this blue-white beacon, fifty times as brilliant as our sun, we may send our minds and bodies, but never our hearts. For no man will ever turn homewards beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth."

"The radiation of the cosmic microwave background... has a red shift of about 1,000. ...the hot plasma of the early universe ...was receding from our location at about 50 times the speed of light."

"Hubble's law predicts that galaxies beyond ...the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light ...this distance is about 14 billion light years. ...galaxies with a redshift of about 1.5—...150 percent longer than the laboratory reference value—are receding at the speed of light. Equivalently, we are receding from those galaxies..."

"One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress."

"The speed of light sucks."

"Fermat had recourse to the principle of the economy of nature. Heron and Olympiodorus had pointed out in antiquity that, in reflection, light followed the shortest possible path, thus accounting for the equality of angles. During the medieval period Alhazen and Grosseteste had suggested that in refraction some such principle was also operating, but they could not discover the law. Fermat, however, not only knew (through Descartes) the law of refraction, but he also invented a procedure—equivalent to the differential calculus—for maximizing and minimizing a function of a single variable. … Fermat applied his method … and discovered, to his delight, that the result led to precisely the law which Descartes had enunciated. But although the law is the same, it will be noted that the hypothesis contradicts that of Descartes. Fermat assumed that the speed of light in water to be less than that in air; Descartes' explanation implied the opposite."

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there."

"One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

"Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute force, or a synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course of and by virtue of the process which draws it together, will, when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. ... The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe."

"Bell's most famous paper in this area — published with Roman Jackiw in Il Nuovo Cimento in 1969 and cited more than any other of his papers — was the discovery, clarified to some extent by Stephen Adler, of the Bell-Jackiw—Adler anomaly. At the time, theory predicted that the neutral pion could not decay into two photons, but this had been observed in experiments. Bell, Jackiw and Adler were able to explain the observed decays theoretically by adding an "anomalous" term resulting from the divergences of quantum field theory. A condition that the "anomaly" produced agreement with experiment was that the sum of the charges of the elementary fermions had to be zero. This provided support for the idea that quarks come in three colours, now part of the widely accepted Standard Model."

"There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts."

"There is nothing that a single massive sphere will or can ever do by itself that says it will both exert and yield attractively with a neighboring massive sphere and that it yields progressively: every time the distance between the two is halved, the attraction will be fourfolded. This unpredicted, only mutual behavior is synergy."

"Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical — because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected—like it or not—"life is but a dream"."

"Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending coordination by putting the children in elementary schools—to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only. Thereafter we force them to choose some specialization, forcing them to forget the whole. ... We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization. We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest. They also simultaneously DIVIDED and CONQUERED any and all "bright ones" who might otherwise rise within their realms to threaten their supremacy. The warlord vitiated their threat by making them all specialists and reserving to himself exclusively the right to think about and act comprehensively. The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself."

"If we have two spherical bodies of equal mass at a given distance from each other and insert a third spherical body of the same mass half way between the two we do not double the mass attraction between any two of the three. We increase the attraction by 2 to the second power which is 4. Halving the distance fourfolds the inter-mass attraction. When we bring a galaxy of iron atoms together with the chromium atoms and a galaxy of nickel atoms they all fit neatly between one another and bring about the multifolding of their intercoherency. But there is nothing in one body by itself that says that it will have mass attraction. This can only be discovered by experimenting with two and more bodies. And even then there is no explanation of why there must be mass attraction and why it should increase as the second power of the relative increase of proximity. That is synergy."

"I will give you one very simple example of synergy. All our metallic alloys are synergetic. We will examine chrome-nickel steel. The outstanding characteristic of metallic strength is its ability to cohere in one piece. We test the metals tensile strength per square inch of cross section of the tested sample. The very high number of pounds-per-square-inch tensile strength of chrome-nickel steel has changed our whole economy because it retained its structural integrity at so high a temperature as to make possible the jet engine which has halved the time it takes to fly around the world."

"Because nature is entirely synergetic and because your problems of representing a society ignorant of such fundamentals are greatly increased you need to pay great attention to learning how to comprehend synergy and thereafter how to educate all of humanity in the shortest time how to comprehend and usefully cope with omni-synergetic universe"

"I find all of our world society is operating exclusively in parts. We know this because the word synergy is unknown popularly and it is the only word that means “behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts.” This proves that society does not even think that it has a need for such a word. This discloses that society does not think that there are behaviors of wholes unpredicted by the parts. It thinks statistics and probability are all that we need but if “probability” and “statistics” were of any power at all we could not have a stock market or gambling for we would know exactly how things are coming out and no one would bet against the probability."

"The word “synergy” means “Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the systems parts.” Nature is comprehensively synergetic. Since synergy is the only word having that meaning and we have proven experimentally that it is not used by the public, we may conclude that society does not understand nature"

"Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation"

"The word synergy is a companion to the word “energy.” Energy and synergy. The prefix “syn” of synthesis meaning “with, to integrate” and the “en” of energy means “separating out ” Man is very familiar with energy, he has learned to separate out, or isolate certain behaviors of total nature and thus has become familiar with many of the separate natural behaviors such as optics. But the only partially isolatable behavior is always modifyingly employed by the whole. If humans had to purchase their many separate organs, stomachs, livers, endocrine glands, tongues, eyeballs, and bowels and thereafter to assemble those parts into logical interfunctioning, they would never do so. All those parts had to be preassembled and unitarily skinned in and coordinately operated by multiquadrillions of atoms in the brain which after 16 years of practical spontaneous coordination becomes so aesthetically acceptable one to the other that as it sings, dances, and smiles one is inclined to procreate with the other."

"I have to ask you, sir, are you familiar with the word “synergy”?...I have been a visitor at 320 universities and colleges around the world and always have asked those university audiences “How many of you are familiar with the word ‘synergy’?” I can say authoritatively that less than 10 percent of university audiences and less than 1 percent of non-university audiences are familiar with the word and meaning of synergy. Synergy is not a popular word."

"As we have seen, Hermann Haken assumed neurons were sub-systems in the brain whereas "thoughts" (Gedanken) represent the order parameters. According to the concepts of synergetics both parts have to react on different timescales in order for the sub-systems to be "enslaved". That holds true for the brain: while the neurons fire on a timescale of milliseconds the perception of new content (Gedanken) varies by tenths of a second."

"The mediating role of the brain can perhaps be best envisaged in terms of synergetic concepts: In thinking or making plans certain parts of the brain undergo coherent, collective activity states of possibly a great number of neurons, where concepts or ideas function as, or are represented by, order parameters of these collective activities. This would mean that in H. Haken's terminology of synergetics neurons or certain states of them (as parts of World 1) become enslaved by elements of World 2 (psychic events) and World 3 (mental entities)."

"I have characterized the social struggle as centrifugal and social solidarity as centripetal. Either alone is productive of evil consequences. Struggle is essentially destructive of the social order, while communism removes individual initiative. The one leads to disorder, the other to degeneracy. What is not seen—the truth that has no expounders—is that the wholesome, constructive movement consists in the properly ordered combination and interaction of both these principles. This is social synergy, which is a form of cosmic synergy, the universal constructive principle of nature."

"The true nature of the universal principle of synergy pervading all nature and creating all the different kinds of structure that we observe to exist, must now be made clearer. Primarily and essentially it is a process of equilibration, i.e., the several forces are first brought into a state of partial equilibrium. It begins in collision, conflict, antagonism, and opposition, and then we have the milder phases of antithesis, competition, and interaction, passing next into a modus vivendi, or compromise, and ending in collaboration and cooperation. … The entire drift is toward economy, conservatism, and the prevention of waste."

"Synergy is a synthesis of work, or synthetic work, and this is what is everywhere taking place. It may be said to begin with the primary atomic collision in which mass, motion, time, and space are involved, and to find its simplest expression in the formula for force (\tfrac{ms}{t^2}), which implies a plurality of elements, and signifies an interaction of these elements. … It further seems probable that vortex motion is based on this principle, or is the same principle, and it is through this that some expect the problem of the nature of gravitation to find its solution."

"Synergy That there is a universal principle, operating in every department of nature and at every stage in evolution, which is conservative, creative, and constructive, has been evident to me for many years, but it required long meditation and extensive observation to discover its true nature. After having fairly grasped it I was still troubled to reduce it to its simplest form, and characterize it by an appropriate name. I have at last fixed upon the word synergy as the term best adapted to express its twofold character of energy and mutuality, or the systematic and organic working together of the antithetical forces of nature. The third and equally essential and invariable quality of creation or construction is still lacking in the name chosen, unless we assume, as I think we may do, that work implies some product, to distinguish it from simple activity."

"Germain's theory of art converged with social psychology in his enthusiastic review of Henri Mazel's Synergie sociale of 1896. Germain found affinities in Mazel's theories of collective energies and cultural regeneration and attached his own notion of the individual's development through moral beauty to Mazel's "culture of will, of moral energy; through love". In La synergie sociale Mazel argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy", or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, for the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, could not distinguish between good and evil. Socialists and anarchists who preached mediocrity led the attack on exceptional individuals—saints, heroes, or artists."

"In short, synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system's components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates. An ordered library offers systemic possibilities, such as rapid search, selection, and aggregation, that cannot be explained by looking at the books themselves. These possibilities only exist because of the investment made in defining and creating interrelations between the books, their physical arrangement and the catalogues."

"Als Physiker, der sein ganzes Leben der nüchternen Wissenschaft, der Erforschung der Materie widmete, bin ich sicher von dem Verdacht frei, für einen Schwarmgeist gehalten zu werden. Und so sage ich nach meinen Erforschungen des Atoms dieses: Es gibt keine Materie an sich. Alle Materie entsteht und besteht nur durch eine Kraft, welche die Atomteilchen in Schwingung bringt und sie zum winzigsten Sonnensystem des Alls zusammenhält. Da es im ganzen Weltall aber weder eine intelligente Kraft noch eine ewige Kraft gibt—es ist der Menschheit nicht gelungen, das heißersehnte Perpetuum mobile zu erfinden—so müssen wir hinter dieser Kraft einen bewußten intelligenten Geist annehmen. Dieser Geist ist der Urgrund aller Materie. Translation: As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter."

"In the mystērion of the church, the participation of men in God is effected through their "cooperation" or "synergy"; to make this participation possible once more is the goal of the incarnation."

"SYN'ERGY, Synergi'a, Synenergi'a, (F.) Synergie; from συν, 'with,' and εργον, 'work.' A correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease."

"Depending on the initial condition of the system (initial alphabet and number of elements) the co-evolution of nested local and global hierarchies continues until the system reaches a maximum value of complexity. At least for nuclear systems a quantitative variable called "complexity" can be defined, which increases in an irreversible manner during stellar evolution (Winiwarter, 1983). This variable C is composed of an informational measure I describing the variety of the computed formulas and an energetic measure R describing the relative binding energy or "synergy" permitting the coherence of the system. Once the maximum complexity of the system is reached, it breaks down. A catastrophic "implosion" destroys local and global hierarchical structures. In some cases—depending on the initial conditions—this "implosion" is accompanied by an "explosion" emitting computed local formulas into space. These emitted local formulas can be captured and re-entered into the initial conditions of a future gnostic cycle."

"In contemplating the papers Einstein wrote in 1905, I often find myself wondering which of them is the most beautiful. It is a little like asking which of Beethoven’s symphonies is the most beautiful."

"1905 is often described as Einstein’s annus mirabilis: a wonderful year in which he came up with three remarkable ideas. These were the Brownian motion in fluids, the photoelectric effect and the special theory of relativity. Each of these was of a basic nature and also had a wide impact on physics."

"Elegant derivations from first principles — which often proved tractable only when applied to idealized situations — were of little value to the many colleagues who needed to fine-tune electronics components for maximum efficiency... Schwinger rearranged his equations in terms of measurable inputs and outputs, just as his engineering colleagues at the Rad Lab had done with real-world electronics. By recasting the calculation, Schwinger managed to calculate the effects of quantum fluctuations on the electron's energy levels and obtain an answer that matched Lamb's measurement to an extraordinary precision. As it turned out, Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga had accomplished the same goal a few years earlier. Tomonaga's work on radar during the war had proven similarly essential to his theoretical approach. This war-forged pragmatism produced enormously impressive research and influenced a generation of leading scientists... Anything that smacked of 'interpretation', or worse, 'philosophy', began to carry a taint for many scientists who had come through the wartime projects. Conceptual scrutiny of foundations struck many as a luxury. The wartime style was reinforced in the United States by exponentially rising university enrolments after the war. The new classroom realities left little space for informal discussion of philosophy or foundations. The Rad Lab rallying cry of “Get the numbers out” shaded into “Shut up and calculate!”"

"Thinking about foundations pays off in the long run. David Mermin once summarized a popular attitude towards quantum theory as “Shut up and calculate!”. We suggest an alternative slogan: “Shut up and contemplate!”"

"You can’t blame most physicists for following this ‘shut up and calculate’ ethos because it has led to tremendous developments in nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid state physics and particle physics."

"With Mie's view of matter there is contrasted another, according to which matter is a limiting singularity of the field, but charges and masses are force-fluxes in the field. This entails a new and more cautious attitude towards the whole problem of matter."

"A new theory by the author has been added, which draws the physical inferences consequent on the extension of the foundations of geometry beyond Reimann... and represents an attempt to derive from world-geometry not only gravitational but also electromagnetic phenomena. Even if this theory is still only in its infant stage, I feel convinced that it contains no less truth than Einstein's Theory of Gravitation—whether this amount of truth is unlimited or, what is more probable, is bounded by the Quantum Theory."