Physics

"Physics deals with a great many quantities that have both size and direction, and it needs a special mathematical language —the language of vectors —to describe those quantities. This language is also used in engineering, the other sciences, and even in common speech."

"If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?"

"I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object."

"Perhaps the first to approach the fourth dimension from the side of physics, was the Frenchman, Nicole Oresme, of the fourteenth century. In a manuscript treatise, he sought a graphic representation of the Aristotelian forms, such as heat, velocity, sweetness, by laying down a line as a basis designated longitudo, and taking one of the forms to be represented by lines (straight or circular) perpendicular to this either as a latitudo or an altitudo. The form was thus represented graphically by a surface. Oresme extended this process by taking a surface as the basis which, together with the latitudo, formed a solid. Proceeding still further, he took a solid as a basis and upon each point of this solid he entered the increment. He saw that this process demanded a fourth dimension which he rejected; he overcame the difficulty by dividing the solid into numberless planes and treating each plane in the same manner as the plane above, thereby obtaining an infinite number of solids which reached over each other. He uses the phrase "fourth dimension" (4am dimensionem)."

"There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it."

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight zone!"

"You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."

"We are not in the Eighth dimension, we are over New Jersey. Hope is not lost."

"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded. "Not visually, anyway," Holloway denied. "All I say is that our minds, conditioned to Euclid, can see nothing in this but an illogical tangle of wires. But a child especially a baby might see more. Not at first. It'd be a puzzle, of course. Only a child wouldn't be handicapped by too many preconceived ideas."

"Time is relative, it can stretch and squeeze, but it can't run backwards. The only thing that can move across dimensions like time is gravity. … Look, Cooper, they're creatures of at least five dimensions, to them the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future a mountain they can climb up... but to us it's not, okay?"

"She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground — perhaps through time, too."

"Lois Lane: I can’t describe what Mxyzptlk then became. He had height, width, depth, and a couple of other things, too."

"Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built."

"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."

"How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!"

"We actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God."

"Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp. Such alertness grows from the sense for the meaningful, for the marvel of matter, for the core of thoughts. It is begotten in passionate love for the significance of all reality, in devotion to the ultimate meaning which is only God."

"The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated."

"Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian — a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer."

"Bailey reached up and shook his arm. "Snap out of it. What the hell are you talking about, four dimensions? Time is the fourth dimension; you can't drive nails into that.""

"Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time."

"Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us."

"In a sensible theory there are no [dimensionless] numbers whose values are determinable only empirically. I can, of course, not prove that ... dimensionless constants in the laws of nature, which from a purely logical point of view can just as well have other values, should not exist. To me in my 'Gottvertrauen' [faith in God] this seems evident, but there might be few who have the same opinion ..."

"It's bigger on the inside!"

"We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us."

"Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it."

"According to the big bang model, space, time, and matter simultaneously expanded into physical existence.... Hence, the mathematical of the space=time combines space and time together under a single coordinate system which is specified by length, width, and height while 'time' is considered as the fourth dimension of the co-ordinate."

"Why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity."

"My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time."

"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing."

"Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life."

"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in."

"He sat back down again in his armchair. “Of course, that name really isn’t accurate. I suppose a pentaract should really be a four-dimensional pentagon, and this is meant to be a picture of a five-dimensional cube.”"

"In a mathematical sense, space is manifoldness, or combination of numbers. Physical space is known as the 3-dimension system. There is the 4-dimension system, there is the 10-dimension system."

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."

"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

"In order that a pendulum may continue to make the same number of oscillations in a given time, it must be shortened as it is carried towards the equator; and the variation of its length in different latitudes affords an accurate measurement of the force of gravity. But the force of gravity has known relation to the figure of the earth, which, therefore, may be determined, by observing the length of the seconds pendulum at different points on its surface."

"I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game."

"When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?"

"Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other."

"Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions."

"Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?”"

"If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum."

"For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a “precision” measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer."

"Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear."

"All the colours look brighter now. Everything they say seems to sound new. Slipping into tomorrow too quick, Yesterday always too good to forget. Stop the swing of the pendulum! Let us through!"

"Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest."

"Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum.... They seem to have an un-argue-out-able position, as is the manner of sophists, but this is no guarantee that they are right."