Physics

"[A unified field theory is] a theory joining the gravitational and the electromagnetic field into one single hyperfield whose equations represent the conditions imposed on the geometrical structure of the universe."

"Einstein’s dissent from quantum mechanics and immersion in the search for a unified field theory were not failures but anticipations. After all, even if many string theorists would disagree with Einstein about the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, much of what goes on in string theory these days looks a lot like what Einstein was doing in his Princeton years, which was trying to find new mathematics that might extend general relativity to a unification of all the forces and particles in nature."

"When Einstein, Weyl, and others began their work on unified field theory, it was natural to assume that this task consisted exclusively of the union of gravitation with electromagnetism. To be sure, the separateness of these two fields posed no conflicts or paradoxes. There were no puzzles such as the nor curious coincidences like the . Nevertheless, it seemed physically well-motivated and appealing to ask, Do nature's only two fields of force, both long-range in character, have a common origin?"

"If the possibilities anticipated here prove to be viable, quantum mechanics would cease to be an independent discipline. It would melt into a deepened ‘theory of matter’ which would have to be built up from regular solutions of non-linear differential equations, – in an ultimate relationship it would dissolve in the ‘world equations’ of the Universe. Then, the dualism ‘matter-field’ would have been overcome as well as the dualism ‘corpuscle-wave’."

"No other theory known to science [other than superstring theory] uses such powerful mathematics at such a fundamental level. ...because any unified field theory first must absorb the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's theory and the Lie groups coming from quantum field theory... The new mathematics, which is responsible for the merger of these two theories, is topology, and it is responsible for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of abolishing the infinities of a quantum theory of gravity."

"Seventy-five years ago this month, The New York Times reported that Albert Einstein had completed his unified field theory — a theory that promised to stitch all of nature's forces into a single, tightly woven mathematical tapestry. But as had happened before and would happen again, closer scrutiny revealed flaws that sent Einstein back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, Einstein's belief that he'd one day complete the unified theory rarely faltered. Even on his deathbed he scribbled equations in the desperate but fading hope that the theory would finally materialize. It didn't."

"[B]y quantum field theory the dichotomy between matter and fields in the sense of a dualism is minimised as every field carries its particle-like quanta. Today’s unified field theories appear in the form of gauge theories; matter is represented by operator valued spin-half quantum fields (s) while the “forces” mediated by “exchange particles” are embodied in gauge fields, i.e., quantum fields of integer spin (s). The space-time geometry used is rigidly fixed, and usually taken to be or, within string and membrane theory, some higher-dimensional also loosely called “space-time”, although its signature might not be Lorentzian and its dimension might be 10, 11, 26, or some other number larger than four. A satisfactory inclusion of gravitation into the scheme of quantum field theory still remains to be achieved."

"Until the end of the thirties, the only accepted fundamental interactions were the electromagnetic and the gravitational, plus, tentatively, something like the “mesonic” or “nuclear” interaction. The physical fields considered in the framework of “unified field theory” including, after the advent of quantum (wave-) mechanics, the satisfying either Schrödinger’s or Dirac’s equation, were all assumed to be classical fields. The quantum mechanical wave function was taken to represent the field of the electron, i.e., a matter field. In spite of this, the construction of quantum field theory had begun already around 1927. ...Nowadays, it seems mandatory to approach unification in the framework of quantum field theory."

"You could not imagine the sum-over-histories picture being true for a part of nature and untrue for another part. You could not imagine it being true for electrons and untrue for gravity. It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing. And this made me profoundly skeptical. I knew how many great scientists had chased this will-o’-the-wisp of a unified theory. The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories. Even Einstein had spent twenty years searching for a unified theory and had found nothing that satisfied him. I admired Dick tremendously, but I did not believe he could beat Einstein at his own game."

"There was a period when cosmology got started. There were some important works in the 30s—the Einstein-Infeld-Hoffman ideas equations]. ...Unified Field theories were the bane of GR in those days. Einstein... was convinced that physics should be primarily geometry... about 10 years later, maybe 15, Steven Weinberg was convinced that geometry was irrelevant... the important stuff is just field theory. ...Weinberg, later... collaborated in proving that physics really is geometry. Except not the geometry of space-time... it's the geometry of the graph paper on which the properties of space-time are conceptually plotted... the idea of a curved connection. If you want to plot... any physical quantity... like a , s, s, etc. you need to plot it on curved graph paper. But Einstein... didn't have that broad an idea of geometry..."

"Regarding the study of the universe on scales of less than... 108 lt-yr... [T]he "top-down"... or "pancake" theory of Zel'dovich et al... [predicts that] pancakes of gas comparable to a were formed first... then galaxies... formed by fragmentation... [into] high-density regions... along lines, filaments and points... The problem of the missing mass, or ... and... of the agreement with the observed level of isotropy of the blackbody radiation... are explained in this top-down model by massive neutrinos... which formed early condensations in the homogeneous plasma... [were] originally moving with relativistic speeds... [and] are usually called Hot Dark Matter. [Another] theory is the "bottom-up" scenario discussed by Lemaître and supported by... Peebles et al... [in which] galaxies were first formed by gravitational interaction... [and] only afterwards... a hierarchy of clusters formed. Some versions of [this] theory explain the missing mass problem... by... exotic particles such as "s," "s," "s," and "s," predicted by some unified field theories. This exotic form of dark matter, moving... much slower than the massive neutrinos, is... called Cold Dark Matter. Mixed models, hot plus cold dark matter, have also been proposed..."

"The resemblance between the Coulomb force and Newton's gravitational force is very impressive. ...[T]he similarity between a planetary system and the electromagnetic structure of an atom... is due to the resemblance between their laws of interaction. ...After the creation of GTR, there followed attempts to reformulate electromagnetic theory in a similar way, attempts to construct a geometric theory of the , and attempts to create a unified field theory which would combine gravitation and electromagnetism. All... failed. The gravitational field acts universally; it imparts equal accelerations to all objects. This... permits one to describe gravity by a change in the properties of... spacetime... The electromagnetic field does not have such a universality; various bodies... have different ratios of charge to mass and experience different accelerations. ...Roughly speaking, the electromagnetic field has energy; and this energy has weight... [T]he equations of GTR for a spacetime which contains an electromagnetic field necessarily force the field to satisfy Maxwell's equations. ...The idea of defining all fields by varying the spacetime curvatures that they create is... ' Its most articulate exponent is... John Archibald Wheeler."

"Although the Special Theory of Relativity does not account for electromagnetic phenomena, it explains many of their properties. General Relativity, however, tells us nothing about . In Einstein's space-time continuum gravitational forces are absorbed in the geometry, but the electromagnetic forces are quite unaffected. Various attempts have been made to generate the geometry of space-time so as to produce a unified field theory incorporating both gravitational and electromagnetic forces."

"So it appears that the only things that depend on the small distances between coupling points are the values for n and j-theoretical numbers that are not directly obseroable any- way; everything else, which can be observed, seems not to be affected. The shell game that we play to find n and j is technically called "renormalization." But no matter how clever the word, it is what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. What is certain is that we do not have a good mathematical way to describe the theory of quantum electrodynamics: such a bunch of words to describe the connection between n and j and m and e is not good mathematics."

"To assert that there exists an order parameter in essence says: ‘‘I may not understand the microscopic phenomena at all’’ (as was historically, the case for superfluid helium), ‘‘but I recognize that there is a microscopic level and I believe it should have certain general, overall properties especially as regards locality and symmetry: those then serve to govern the most characteristic behavior on scales greater than atomic.’’ ... Know the nature of the order parameter—suppose, for example, it is a complex number and like a wave function—then one knows much about the macroscopic nature of a physical system! ... Landau's introduction of the order parameter exposed a novel and unexpected foliation or level in our understanding of the physical world. Traditionally, one characterizes statistical mechanics as directly linking the microscopic world of nuclei and atoms (on length scales of 10-13 to 10-8 cm) to the macroscopic world of say, millimeters to meters. But the order parameter, as a dynamic, fluctuating object in many cases intervenes on an intermediate or mesoscopic level characterized by scales of tens or hundreds of angstroms up to microns (say, 10-6.5 to 10-3.5 cm)."

"[W]hen we have ideas and pictures that are extremely useful, they acquire elements of reality in and of themselves. But, philosophically, it is instructive to look at the degree to which such objects are purely instrumental—merely useful tools—and the extent to which physicists seriously suppose they embody an essence of reality... it is possible to view the renormalization group as merely an instrument or a computational device. On the other hand, at one extreme, one might say: ‘‘Well, the partition function itself is really just a combinatorial device.’’ But most practitioners tend to think of it (and especially its logarithm, the free energy) as rather more basic!"

"Hence most physicists are very satisfied with the situation. They say: "Quantum electrodynamics is a good theory, and we do not have to worry about it any more." I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation, because this so-called "good theory" does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it turns out to be small—not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!"

"Little things affect big things, but they rarely affect very big things. Instead, little things affect slightly bigger things. And these, in turn, affect slightly bigger things too. But as you go up the chain, you lose the information about what came long before... In the 1970s a mathematical formalism was developed that makes these ideas concrete. This formalism is called the renormalisation group and provides a framework to describe physics at different scales. The renormalisation group gets little coverage in popular science articles, yet is arguably the single most important advance in theoretical physics in the past 50 years. While zoologists may have little need to talk to particle physicists, the right way to understand both the Higgs boson and the flocking of starlings is through the language of the renormalisation group."

"The quantum field theory of electrons and photons in the late 1940s had scored a tremendous success. Theorists – Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga, Dyson – had figured out after decades of effort how to do calculations preserving not only Lorentz invariance but also the appearance of Lorentz invariance at every stage of the calculation. This allowed them to sort out the infinities in the theory that had been noticed in the early 1930s by Oppenheimer and Waller, and that had been the bête noire of theoretical physics throughout the 1930s. They were able to show in the late 1940s that these infinities could all be absorbed into a redefinition, called a renormalization, of the electron mass and charge and the scales of the various fields. And they were able to do calculations of unprecedented precision, which turned out to be verified by experiment: calculations of the Lamb shift and the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron."

"Feynman comments that the renormalization theory is simply way to sweep difficulties under the rug. All the players, Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman feel that the theory that they have developed is intellectually not satisfactory. What they have provided is only a conservative solution but what is needed is a radical innovation and a revolutionary departure similar to what has been made in the nineteen thirties by Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac."

"After such successes, it is not surprising that quantum electrodynamics in its simple renormalizable version has become generally accepted as the correct theory of photons and electrons. Nevertheless, despite the experimental success of the theory, and even though the infinities in this theory all cancel when one handles them correctly, the fact that the infinities occur at all continues to produce grumbling about quantum electrodynamics and similar theories. Dirac in particular always referred to renormalization as sweeping the infinities under the rug. I disagreed with Dirac and argued the point with him at conferences at Coral Gables and Lake Constance. Taking account of the difference between the bare charge and mass of the electron and their measured values is not merely a trick that is invented to get rid of infinities; it is something we would have to do even if everything was finite. There is nothing arbitrary or ad hoc about the procedure; it is simply a matter of correctly identifying what we are actually measuring in laboratory measurements of the electron’s mass and charge. I did not see what was so terrible about an infinity in the bare mass and charge as long as the final answers for physical quantities turn out to be finite and unambiguous and in agreement with experiment. It seemed to me that a theory that is as spectacularly successful as quantum electrodynamics has to be more or less correct, although we may not be formulating it in just the right way. But Dirac was unmoved by these arguments. I do not agree with his attitude toward quantum electrodynamics, but I do not think that he was just being stubborn; the demand for a completely finite theory is similar to a host of other aesthetic judgments that theoretical physicists always need to make."

"During the Symposium on the Past Decade in Particle Theory at the University of Texas at Austin in April 1970, I had occasion to bring Dirac and Feynman together for a discussion at dinner. Dirac told Feynman that the relativistic quantum electrodynamics in its present form was an ugly theory, and before tackling the more difficult problems of elementary particle physics 'one must try to solve the problems of quantum electrodynamics. Electrodynamics is something we know most about, and we must find a consistent theory of it rather than get rid of the infinities in an arbitrary manner.' Feynman agreed with Dirac."

"A new technique has been developed for carrying out the renormalization of mass and charge in quantum electrodynamics, which is completely general in that it results not merely in divergence-free solutions for particular problems but in divergence-free equations of motion which are applicable to any problem. Instead of using a power-series expansion in the whole radiation interaction, the new method uses expansions in powers of the high-frequency part of the interaction. The convergence of the perturbation theory is thereby much improved. The method promises to be especially useful in applications to meson theory."

"I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine rather than Aristotle's, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine. Feeling that way, I continued to puzzle over the text, and my suspicions ultimately proved well-founded. I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me and with a four-colored pencil in my hand. Looking up, I gazed abstractedly out the window of my room -- the visual image is one I still retain. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before."

"It is said, that Alexander the Great wrote to his former tutor to this effect; "You have not done well in publishing these lectures; for how shall we, your pupils, excel other men, if you make that public to all, which we learnt from you." To this Aristotle is said to have replied; "My Lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside." This may very easily be a story invented and circulated among those who found the work beyond their comprehension; and it cannot be denied, that to make out the meaning and reasoning of every part, would be a task very laborious and difficult, if not impossible."

"The medieval theologians would not be surprised at a prerequisite of a degree in physics for a degree in theology. In their time, the highest degree in philosophy—which included the most advanced knowledge of physics of the day—was a prerequisite before a student was permitted to begin study for a degree in theology ...Kenny has shown the Aquinas' Five Ways—his five proofs of God's existence—are absolutely dependent on Aristotelian physics... Aquinas... was one of the leading scholars of Aristotelian physics... and... was primarily responsible for... [its] general acceptance throughout Europe. We could call Aquinas a great physicist as well as a great theologian, for, although Aristotelian physics was wrong, it was an essential precursor of modern physics."

"The victory of orthodox Christian doctrine over classical thought was to some extent a , for the theology that triumphed over Greek philosophy has continued to be shaped ever since by the language and the thought of classical metaphysics. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 decreed that "in the sacrament of the altar... the bread is transubstantiated into the body [of Christ]." ...Most of the theological expositions of the term "" have interpreted "substance" [according] to the meaning given this term ...in the fifth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics; transubstantiation, then, would appear to be tied to the acceptance of Aristotelian metaphysics or even of Aristotelian physics. ...Transubstantiation is an individual instance of what has been called the problem of "the hellenization of Christianity.""

"Galileo's comprehension of the concept of acceleration, which he defined as a change of velocity either in magnitude or direction... was an abstract idea that no one seems to have thought much about before. And in using it to test the still accepted Aristotelian precept that a moving object requires a force to maintain it, Galileo easily demonstrated that it is not motion but rather acceleration which cannot occur without an external force. Deliberately rejecting common sense as a prejudiced witness, he let nature herself speak in the form of a "hard, smooth and very round ball" rolling down a "very straight" ideal groove lined with polished parchment, and then rolling up another groove, clocking each roll "hundreds or times"... he showed that, while downward motion (helped by gravity force) makes speed increase and upward motion (hindered by gravity force) makes speed decrease, there is always a "boundary case" in between... where speed remains constant (without any appreciable force)—and that, by reducing friction, this boundary case can be made to approach a horizontal level where gravity has no effect. Similarly testing... he also drafted a law of falling bodies: "that the distances traversed, during equal intervals of time... stand to one another in the same ratio as the odd numbers beginning with unity." And his beautiful analysis of a cannonball's trajectory into horizontal and vertical components... was one day to be of enormous help to Isaac Newton in solving the riddle of gravity."

"The attitude of Aristotelian physics toward lawfulness takes a new direction. So long as lawfulness remained limited to such processes as occurred repeatedly in the same way, it is evident, not only that the young physics still lacked the courage to extend the principle to all physical phenomena, but also that the concept of lawfulness still had a fundamentally historic, a temporally particular, significance. Stress was laid not upon the “general validity” which modem physics understands by lawfulness, but upon the events in the historically given world which displayed the required stability. The highest degree of lawfulness, beyond mere frequency, was characterized by the idea of the always eternal."

"For Aristotelian physics the membership of an object in a given class was of critical importance, because for Aristotle the class defined the essence or essential nature of the object, and thus determined its behavior in both positive and negative respects."

"[An] example of the hubris of contemporary science is the rigorous banishment of the word "purpose" from its vocabulary. This is probably an aftermath of the reaction against the animism of Aristotelian physics, where stones accelerated their fall because of their impatience to get home, and against a teleological world-view in which the purpose of the stars was to serve as chronometers for man's profit. From Galileo onward, "final causes" were relegated into the realm of superstition, mechanical causality reigned supreme. ...The mechanistic universe gradually disintegrated, but the mechanistic notion of causality survived until Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle proved its untenability."

"Let it be conceived that the [or a] particle acquires a tendency to move, and that nevertheless it does not move. It is then in a condition totally different from that in which it was at first. A cause competent to produce motion is operating upon it, but for some reason or other, is unable to give rise to motion. If the obstacle is removed, the energy which was there, but could not manifest itself, at once gives rise to motion. While the restraint lasts, the energy of the particle is merely potential; and the case supposed illustrates what is meant by potential energy. In this contrast of the potential with the actual, modern physics is turning to account the most familiar of Aristotelian distinctions—that between δύναμιζ [potential] and ένέργεια [action, effect, entelechy, power or energy]."

"Gaukroger believes that contemporary physicists concern themselves with a kind of mathematical knowledge that“ is clearly not the same as that derived by abstraction from individual cases.” Indeed, he goes goes so far as to claim that true scientific knowledge, “cannot be attained, at least in [Aristotelian] physics and cosmology."

"With the discovery of the law of inertia and the subsequent downfall of the Aristotelian theory of motion on which Kepler had based his work, his physical theories soon became outmoded and were then rendered obsolete by Newton's work. Yet Kepler's laws of planetary motion remained, so that Edmond Halley could write in his review of Newton's Principia that the first eleven propositions were found to agree with the phenomena of celestial motions, as discovered by the great sagacity and diligence of Kepler."

"When mons. Descartes's philosophical Romance, by the Elegance of its Style and the plausible Accounts of natural Phænomena, had overthrown the Aristotelian Physics, the World received but little Advantage by the Change: For instead of a few Pedants, who, most of them, being conscious of their Ignorance, concealed it with hard Words and pompous Terms; a new Set of Philosophers started up, whose lazy Disposition easily fell in with a Philosophy, that required no Mathematicks to understand it, and who taking a few Principles for granted, without examining their Reality or Consistence with each other, fancied they could solve all Appearances mechanically by Matter and Motion; and, in their smattering Way, pretended to demonstrate such things, as perhaps Cartesius himself never believed; his Philosophy (if he bad been in earnest) being unable to stand the test of the Geometry which he was Master of."

"[T]he peculiar character of that Aristotelian universe... things... in motion had to be accompanied by a mover all of the time. A universe... [that] had the door half-way open for spirits...unseen hands had to be in constant operation... sublime Intelligences had to roll the planetary spheres... Alternatively, bodies had to be endowed with souls and aspirations... [M]atter itself seemed to possess mystical qualities."

"[T]he Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest—it was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained."

"There are at present fundamental problems in theoretical physics awaiting solution, e.g., the relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics and the nature of atomic nuclei (to be followed by more difficult ones such as the problem of life), the solution of which problems will presumably require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before. Quite likely these changes will be so great that it will be beyond the power of human intelligence to get the necessary new ideas by direct attempts to formulate the experimental data in mathematical terms."

"Even with our best understanding in traditional physics, there are dozens of different things that we can call elementary particles. The idea of string theory is to get all the different elementary particles — muons, neutrinos, electrons, up quarks, gluons, and so on — as different states of vibration of one basic string."

"It's a remarkable fact that matter at the subatomic level consists of tiny chunks, with vast empty spaces in between. Even more remarkable, these tiny chunks come in a small number of different types (electrons, protons, neutrons, pi mesons, neutrinos, and so on), which are then replicated in astronomical quantities to make all the "stuff" around us. And these replicas are absolutely perfect copies—not just "pretty similar," like two Fords coming off the same assembly line, but utterly indistinguishable."

"One of the most natural questions when one looks at the mass of uncorrelated data on elementary particle interactions is whether a systematic pattern is emerging from this complexity. The penetration of controlled laboratory experiments into the multi-Bev energy region can only make such a question more acute."

"In general, the rate of evaporation (m) of a substance in a high vacuum is related to the pressure (p) of the saturated vapor by the equation m=\sqrt{\frac{M}{2\pi RT}}p. Red phosphorus and some other substances probably form exceptions to this rule."

"Mathematicians are only dealing with the structure of reasoning, and they do not really care what they are talking about. They do not even need to know what they are talking about, or, as they themselves say, whether what they say is true. I will explain that. You state the axioms, such-and-such is so, and such-and-such is so. What then? The logic can be carried out without knowing what the such-and-such words mean. If the statements about the axioms are carefully formulated and complete enough, it is not necessary for the man who is doing the reasoning to have any knowledge of the meaning of the words in order to deduce new conclusions in the same language. … But the physicist has meaning to all his phrases. That is a very important thing that a lot of people who come to physics by way of mathematics do not appreciate. Physics is not mathematics, and mathematics is not physics. One helps the other. But in physics you have to have an understanding of the connection of words with the real world."

"At this point an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things? In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this: as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

"Bohr proposed in the first place that the energies of atoms are quantized, in the sense that the atom exists in only a discrete set of states, with energies (in increasing order) E1, E2, . . . . The frequency of a photon emitted in a transition m → n or absorbed in a transition n → m is given by Einstein’s formula E = hν and energy conservation by \nu=(E_m-E_n)/h. … Bohr’s formulas could be used not only for single-electron atoms, like hydrogen or singly ionized helium, but also roughly for the innermost orbits in heavier atoms, where the charge of the nucleus is not screened by electrons, and we can take Ze as the actual charge of the nucleus."

"I do not know if you appreciate the fact that long papers have a way of frightening readers, who feel that they have not time to dip into them."

"When the equinox entered Pisces, the Savior of the World "appeared as the Fisher of Men.""

"I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December."

"At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water."

"The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment."