First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"I grew up in the 1980s in the UK, and we had the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, all that. People were very, very aware. When I was 13, me and my friends, we were convinced we would die in a nuclear holocaust… What I remember from the '80s is that the fear of nuclear war had receded in favor of fear of environmental destruction. It was almost like we couldn't sustain the fear of it for that long. We have a complicated relationship with our fear. And yes, Putin has been using that doomsday threat and that fear to saber-rattle. It's extremely unnerving."
"Although specifically designed for the anti-nuclear movement it has quite deliberately never been copyrighted. No one has to pay or to seek permission before they use it. A symbol of freedom, it is free for all. This of course sometimes leads to its use, or misuse, in circumstances that CND and the peace movement find distasteful. It is also often exploited for commercial, advertising or generally fashion purposes. We can’t stop this happening and have no intention of copyrighting it. All we can do is to ask commercial users if they would like to make a donation. Any money received is used for CND’s peace education and information work."
"I don’t think the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has much chance of actually affecting the government. It’s one of the first things you have to face up to. But we do it to keep our self-respect to show to ourselves, each one to himself or herself, that we care. And to let other people, all the lazy, sulky, hopeless ones like you, know that someone cares. We’re trying to shame you into thinking about it, about acting."
"CND campaigns non-violently to rid the world of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and to create genuine security for future generations. CND opposes all nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction: their development, manufacture, testing, deployment and use or threatened use by any country."
"2018 is the 60th anniversary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was founded on the 17th February 1958 at the height of the cold war. CND is planning a number of events — as well as publishing a new book — to mark the 60th year of one of the world's most powerful collective voices against the dangers of nuclear weapons"
"One of the most widely known symbols in the world, in Britain it is recognised as standing for nuclear disarmament – and in particular as the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In the United States and much of the rest of the world it is known more broadly as the peace symbol. It was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist and a graduate of the Royal College of Arts. … The Direct Action Committee had already planned what was to be the first major anti-nuclear march, from London to Aldermaston, where British nuclear weapons were and still are manufactured. It was on that march, over the 1958 Easter weekend that the symbol first appeared in public. Five hundred cardboard lollipops on sticks were produced. Half were black on white and half white on green. Just as the church’s liturgical colours change over Easter, so the colours were to change, “from Winter to Spring, from Death to Life.” Black and white would be displayed on Good Friday and Saturday, green and white on Easter Sunday and Monday."
"The first badges were made by Eric Austin of Kensington CND using white clay with the symbol painted black. Again there was a conscious symbolism. They were distributed with a note explaining that in the event of a nuclear war, these fired pottery badges would be among the few human artifacts to survive the nuclear inferno."
"The strong force may not unify with the other forces. There’s no evidence for unification in our Universe so far, as proton decay experiments have come up empty. The initial motivation is flimsy here as well: If you put any three curves on a log-log scale and zoom out far enough, they will always look like a triangle where the three lines just barely miss coming together at a single point."
"In the case of the strong interactions, there was a wealth of experimental data, much of it of high precision. Hadronic masses and magnetic moments, nuclear binding energies and transition rates, many things were measured with great accuracy. But the strongly interacting world was so complicated that most of the experimental data was hard to interpret. Only a fraction of the experimental knowledge of strong interactions, such as the scaling behaviour in deep inelastic electron-nucleon scattering, gave simple clues about the underlying quark-gluon world. As a result, experimental clues alone did not suffice."
"In 1933 Enrico Fermi suggested that beta radioactivity, and the manner in which the neutron spontaneously decayed, could be described using a formalism similar to that developed by Dirac for the electromagnetic force, but 10-10 times weaker. With its range of only about 1/1,000th the diameter of the nucleus, it could not play a role in binding the nucleus, but it could affect individual s. The fact that the metastable particles exhibited the same characteristic time of 10-10 second indicated that this weak force acted on many types of particles. ...a 'characteristic time' ...being the time for an interaction across a nucleus 3 fm in diameter; an event taking place in a shorter time [than 10-23 seconds for the strong force] has 'no meaning'. ...For electromagnetic interactions, the strength is 10-3 of the strong force, and so the characteristic time is longer (10-20 [seconds]); this is roughly the time for a photon to cross an atom."
"In addition to transforming a neutron into a proton and vice versa, the weak force was evidently responsible for the decay of a muon into an electron. ...[W]hen the strange particles were found to decay without s it was realized that the force was more complex than had been posited in Fermi's theory of beta decay. Nevertheless, the fact that aspects of the force could be explained by an electromagnetic formalism implied that these forces shared an underlying symmetry."
"The mass of the W and Z prevents the weak force from extending beyond their Compton length (about a hundredth the size of a proton)..."
"[T]he work of a number of theoretical physicists in the 1960s culminated in the electroweak theory that is designed to unify electromagnetism and the weak force... This theory is sometimes called the 'GWS Theory', from... Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam... The main feature of the theory is that at extremely high temperatures the electromagnetic and weak forces are two components of a single force, the electroweak force. The symmetry between the two forces would only be apparent at temperatures of trillions of degrees... in the Big Bang. At lower temperatures... electromagnetism remains a long range force, but the weak force takes on the characteristics of... a very weak force that acts over extremely short distances. ...But the theory is dependent on the existence of the Higgs particle..."
"[W]hat shall we say, then, to a nuclear event such as... beta decay... in which a neutron turns into a proton and also shoots out an electron together with an antineutrino? ...Coming from within... is the weak interaction. Not in all nuclei, but certainly in many... the weak interaction sometimes subverts the neutrons and protons bound otherwise so strongly. It takes only a change in flavor. The weak force, with the weak interaction charges as the source, transforms a into an and hence a into a . At the same time, an electron and antineutrino spring loose... The strong force plays no part here, since neither the electron nor the antineutrino carries a strong interaction charge. Electrically neutral, the antineutrino escapes the electromagnetic force as well. ...the weak force ...allows a neutron to decay into a proton, electron, and antineutrino. The four particles all carry weak interaction charges, and their common endowment makes them all actors in a single play."
"s were among the most paradoxical members of the zoo of elementary particles that were discovered after the war. Produced during radioactive decay, they supposedly had neither charge nor mass and they traveled, consequently, at the speed of light. Their only interaction with the world (besides gravity) was by something called the "weak" force, which causes some kinds of radioactive decay. It was so weak that, according to calculations, a typical neutrino could pass through a million miles of water unhindered—stars and planets were transparent to them."
"Antoine-Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. Becquerel's discovery preceded J. J. Thomson's... electron by one year. Radioactivity comes in three kinds, called alpha, beta, and gamma. ...only one ...(beta) has to do with the weak interactions. Today we know that the beta rays were actually electrons emitted by neutrons in the nucleus. ...Nothing in QED or QCD explains how a neutron can emit an electron and become a proton. ...Becquerel didn't know ...that another particle flew off... the antiparticle of the ghostly neutrino. ...The neutrino ...doesn't emit photons. It doesn't emit s. This means it [does not experience the respective electromagnetic or s] that electrically charged particles or s experience. The W-boson is key to the neutrino's activities. Not only can the electrons and quarks emit W-bosons—so too can the neutrino. ...[O]ne of the two d-quarks in a neutron can emit a W-boson and become a u-quark, thus turning a neutron into a proton. ...the W-boson is exchanged, where in a QED diagram, the photon would be exchanged. ...weak interactions are very closely related to the electric forces due to photons. ...The W-boson... splits into two particles: an electron and a neutrino "moving backward in time,"... an antineutrino. That's what Becquerel would have seen... had he had a powerful enough microscope."
"The weak force does not seem to hold anything together, only to break it apart. ...we do not observe s of the weak force. ...So the weak force seems a force apart... Interwoven with the surprising story of the weak force has been the story of s, arguably the most intriguing of the fundamental particles. ...the neutrinos provide a unique and valuable mirror on the weak force. ...In the 1920s, and for a while disputed the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in β decay. ...Chadwick demonstrated... that the spectrum was continuous, i.e. the electron could take on a whole range of energies. ...contrary to the single line expected from energy conservation if only... the electron and the nucleus, were involved... Neils Bohr advocated abandoning energy conservation... but in 1930 Wolfgang Pauli daringly proposed an unseen... neutrino... Pauli's intuition... inspired Enrico Fermi in his 'tentative theory of β decay'... to become the basis for ideas of a universal weak force."
"The first intimations that β decay is but one manifestation of some deeper fundamental interaction came during the 1940s from experiments which led to the discovery of the . ...A third charged , the tau, and three neutral neutrinos bring the number of family members to six. In addition there are six corresponding antiparticles. It appears that in any interaction a lepton can be created (or can disappear) only together with an antilepton. This empirical rule of 'lepton conservation'... implies... that it is an antineutrino that accompanies the electron in β decay. ...When the decay or capture of a muon was treated in the same way as β decay in Fermi's theory, the s... appeared remarkably similar. ...The agreement between the coupling constants for β decay, muon decay and muon capture led to the idea of a 'universal Fermi interaction' and... experiments began to reveal more and more new particles with similar weak interactions."
"Why can stars do better than the big bang? ...During the big bang, there were only a few minutes when nuclei could form. Very rare processes, or slow ones, played little role. A case in point is the key process from which the sun derives its energy. In this reaction, two protons collide to produce a deuterium nucleus, a neutrino, and a positron. ...This reaction belongs to the family of weak interactions. ...It remains... a remarkable—and for humanity, remarkably fortunate—circumstance that the central reaction that drives the sun is so rare. It is only this extraordinary rarity that allows the average proton in the sun to last so long, billions of years, even though it is colliding with other protons millions of times a second. ...an entertaining example of Treiman's theorem."
"Once helium burning has occurred... the next possible reaction—carbon burning—is not necessarily slow... This reaction involves ...a strong as opposed to a weak interaction. ...Carbon burning results in magnesium. ...Taking a cross section of a highly evolved star would reveal a system of many layers. The inner layers have been subjected to the largest pressures, thereby forced to the highest temperatures, and burned the furthest; the outermost layers, by contrast, have not burned at all. Thus, as we proceed from outside in, there will be an outermost layer with the initial mix of hydrogen and helium, a layer of mostly helium, a layer of carbon, a layer of magnesium, and so on. ...So we arrive at the picture of a star, in the latest stages of its evolution... now composed of mostly carbon nuclei and other explosive material."
"If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. ...in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg ...The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired."
"It appears that the strong interactions and electromagnetic interactions are invariant with respect to C, P, and T separately, while the weak interactions do not conserve P or C. All experimental results are consistent with the assumption the T invariance holds true for all interactions; consequently, from the CPT theorem, weak interactions must be invariant under CP. One could not, then, determine if the photographed scene were a scene of particles viewed normally, or a scene of antiparticles projected in a mirror."
"The weak force... least fits into our typical picture of what a force should do. ...the categories of 'attractive' and 'repulsive' do not really fit the weak force ... because it has the ability to change particles from one type to another. ...The weak force can change one into another provided they are in the same generation. The electron can be changed into an electron and vice versa, but the electron cannot be turned into the ..."
"In his theory of beta reactivity Fermi introduced a new type of interactions among elementary particles, which today we call "weak interactions". Many new manifestations of weak interactions, which could be interpreted using Fermi's 1933 theory, were found in the following decades. The study of weak interactions has led to surprising discoveries, among which the violation of specular symmetry (known as parity symmetry or P symmetry), and the violation of time reversal symmetry (T symmetry) and of the symmetry between matter and antimatter (CP symmetry)."
"The... weak force... couples to both s and s, and is very short-ranged due to the large rest mass of the messenger quanta involved. Its effective strength is usually many orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism, and its action can cause particles to change identity, as when a neutron decays. Unlike the electromagnetic and strong forces, the weak force violates parity conservation."
"For the weak force... universality of coupling strength is not readily apparent. ic weak forces are very different in nature from ic weak processes."
"How can s be produced in the center of the sun and how can they be detected in laboratories here on earth if they are subject neither to the strong force nor to the electromagnetic one? Another force, the so-called weak force, is responsible. The electron neutrino does participate in that interaction, along with the electron."
"The weak force gives rise to reactions... These reactions involve a change of flavor... one version involving the exchange of a positively charged quantum and the other the exchange of a negatively charged quantum. The existence of such quanta was first discussed by some of us in the late 1950s, and they were discovered at CERN twenty-five years later, in experiments that procured a Nobel prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The quanta are usually called W + and W -, as they were designated in a celebrated paper by T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang..."
"In 1952... I tried to explain the behavior of the new "strange particles," so called because they were copiously produced as though strongly interacting and yet decayed slowly as though weakly interacting. (Here "slowly" means a half-life of something like a ten billionth of a second... a strongly interacting particle means... a ten trillionth of a second, roughly the time it takes for light to cross such a particle.) ...I thought of assigning these strange particles isotopic spin I = 5/2... But the notion failed to work... I was invited to talk at the Institute for Advanced Study... By a slip of the tongue I said "I = 1" instead... Immediately I stopped dead, realizing I = 1 would do the job. ...But what about the alleged rule that ic strongly interacting particle states had to have values of I like 1/2 or 3/2 or 5/2? ...the rule was merely a superstition... unnecessary baggage that had come along with the useful concept of isotopic spin... [which now] could have wider applications than before. ...[T]he strange particle states differ from more familiar ones such as neutron or proton or s by having at least one s or "strange" quark in place of a u or d quark. Only the weak interaction can convert one flavor of quark into another, and that process happens slowly."
"The strong and weak forces are less familiar because their strength rapidly diminishes over all but subatomic distance scales; they are the s. This is why these two forces were discovered only much more recently. The strong force is responsible for keeping quarks "glued" together inside of protons and neutrons and keeping protons and neutrons tightly crammed together inside atomic nuclei. The weak force is best known for the radioactive decay of substances such as uranium and cobalt."
"Beta decay was…like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it."
"In beta decay experiments it is generally some properties of the emitted , the electron and neutrino, that are measured, such as their energy, polarization or angular distribution. ...In beta decay, angular momentum is conserved but it is now known that parity is not conserved. The leptons are emitted in states of indefinite parity."
"Moreover, even when the chance of a particular event turns out to be extremely small, it is important to resist the idea that that event could not have occurred. Imagine that you own a ticket in a lottery with an extremely large number of tickets—a million, say—and that the lottery is decided by a fundamentally random process, one that has no underlying causal basis by which the outcome will be determined. (You might suppose that each ticket is associated with a specific atomic nucleus of some radioactive element, and that the prize will go to the person whose nucleus decays first.)"
"But it is possible that certain species of primates are apt to go to pieces under conditions which lead them to effect changes of space-time systems. Such species would only experience a long range of endurance, if they had succeeded in forming a favourable association among primates of different species, such that in this association the tendency to collapse is neutralised by the environment of the association. We can imagine the atomic nucleus as composed of a large number of primates of differing species, and perhaps with many primates of the same species, the whole association being such as to favour stability. An example of such an assoÂciation is afforded by the association of a positive nucleus with negative electrons to obtain a neutral atom. The neutral atom is thereby shielded from any electric field which would otherwise produce changes in the space time system of the atom."
"Although complex, the theory behind the practice of magnetic resonance spectroscopy is based on the fact that, when surrounded by a magnetic field, atomic nuclei may be disrupted by radio frequency waves at specific frequencies, which cause the nuclei to generate signals that can be detected by a radio receiver. These signals can then be converted into meaningful information in the form of spectra, which can subsequently be interpreted to gain information concerning the chemical composition at the region of interest (ROI). Central to the theory behind MRS is the concept of atomic spin, which designates a physical property of subatomic particles. The overall spin of a nucleus is determined by its mass number, the total number of protons and neutrons it contains: an even mass number results in no net spin, whereas an uneven mass number results in a net spin."
"The great explorer of complex rhythms and meters combined with a totally liberated spirit of dissonance, Edgar Varese dispensed with the term compositionin his works. He called his music “organized sound.” It is completely removed from the world of sounds observable in nature. Even in a score that bears the seemingly descriptive title Ameriques, Varese tends to represent the conceptual Americas as the birthplace of new science, new technology and new sound. His other works bear such scientific titles as Integrals and Hyperprism (a projection of a prism into higher dimensions). His unique score entitled Ionisation is arranged for pitchless percussion instruments and two sirens. The title refers to the disintegration of atomic nuclei."
Heute, am 12. Tag schlagen wir unser Lager in einem sehr merkwürdig geformten Höhleneingang auf. Wir sind von den Strapazen der letzten Tage sehr erschöpft, das Abenteuer an dem großen Wasserfall steckt uns noch allen in den Knochen. Wir bereiten uns daher nur ein kurzes Abendmahl und ziehen uns in unsere Kalebassen-Zelte zurück. Dr. Zwitlako kann es allerdings nicht lassen, noch einige Vermessungen vorzunehmen. 2. Aug.
- Das Tagebuch
Es gab sie, mein Lieber, es gab sie! Dieses Tagebuch beweist es. Es berichtet von rätselhaften Entdeckungen, die unsere Ahnen vor langer, langer Zeit während einer Expedition gemacht haben. Leider fehlt der größte Teil des Buches, uns sind nur 5 Seiten geblieben.
Also gibt es sie doch, die sagenumwobenen Riesen?
Weil ich so nen Rosenkohl nicht dulde!
- Zwei auĂźer Rand und Band
Und ich bin sauer!