Physicists From The United States

"Alchemy was useful but never compassionate."

"Because the universe was a cold, callous place. And they had just peered into the gulf separating the astronomically unlikely from the truly impossible."

"The grotesque machine reassembled its head. The medical servitor stood, emitted a burst of ticktock cog chatter, then flung itself into the massacre with the fervor of a religious zealot."

"To lose the satchel now would prove that God, if He existed, was a truly sadistic son of a bitch."

"“It’s a debate,” he spat, “over truth. Which truth is more true? The inspiring myth or the bleak, blood-caked reality?”"

"“What the hell was that?” “That was a close call wrapped in some very unpleasant philosophical questions.”"

"“Have you any idea how long and painful my convalescence was?” Berenice shrugged. “Have you any idea how little I care?”"

"You’re no stranger to spinning gold from the hay of human misery, are you?"

"“How have you acquired such intimate knowledge of our kind’s innermost construction?” “You know exactly how. You need me because I’m not burdened with a system of mores that hobbles my inquiries. So you can drop the indignation and make yourselves useful.”"

"“The duke was right about you.” “He survived? That’s a shame.”"

"Huygens, there are times when I take comfort in my sinful nature, for it means I’ll meet you in hell. I’ll be the one stomping on your jewels with singular dedication."

"Every additional second the king didn’t take a bullet in the eye seemed a good sign."

"Your family excels at being a pain in my ass. Are you certain you’re not part Dutch?"

"Only a fool wasted energy on things he could not control."

"But the speculation was pointless. The past was forever in the past."

"“Well,” he said, “you must be feeling very proud of yourself right now.” “It occurs to me that I might be an underappreciated genius.” She paused to clutch the mast again during a particularly hard gust. “But I’ll tell you something. It’s not so wonderful, learning you were right all along to suspect the world is conspiring against you.”"

"We’ve drawn attention to ourselves with our obsessive need to stay inconspicuous."

"“You narrow-minded idiots have mistaken delaying the inevitable for a divinely bestowed right to survive… You aren’t noble survivors of a historical tragedy, you’re a lingering curiosity of a bygone age. The last vestige of a primitive past. Dust to be swept away. The difference between you and I, dear Berenice, is that I recognized the broom for what it was. And got out of the way.”"

"Such were the brittle threads of a relationship built not on trust but on a slurry of fear, mutual codependence, and self-interest."

"It isn’t courtly politics if somebody doesn’t get a dagger in the back."

"It’s not my fault your makers made you humorless."

"Perhaps there really was a God, and He was just as cruel as the humans He made in His form."

"Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation."

"We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who seek it will achieve full equality of opportunity. But if women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed."

"We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and want to belong exclusively in the home."

"We were witnessing the birth of a new era in endocrinology, one that started with Yalow."

"How do we get emotions and feelings out of neurons which, presumably, don't have emotions and feelings?"

"The long and imposing list of physicists (among them Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman) who had tried or were trying their hand at superconductivity should have given me pause. Even Einstein, in 1922 — before the quantum theory of metals was in place — had attempted to construct a theory of superconductivity. Fortunately, I was unaware of these many unsuccessful attempts. So when John invited me to join him (he, somehow, neglected to mention these previous efforts), I decided to take the plunge."

"The fundamental qualitative difference between the superconducting and normal ground state wave function is produced when the large degeneracy of the single particle electron levels in the normal state is removed. If we visualize the Hamiltonian matrix which results from an attractive two-body interaction in the basis of normal metal configurations, we find in this enormous matrix, sub-matrices in which all single-particle states except for one pair of electrons remain unchanged. These two electrons can scatter via the electron-electron interaction to all states of the same total momentum. We may envisage the pair wending its way (so to speak) over all states unoccupied by other electrons."

"Relativity, from one viewpoint the beginning of twentieth-century physics, is from another the capstone of classical physics, the final and most elegant variation of the world view initiated by Galileo and Newton. In a sense, after Einstein, classical physics, just as after Mozart classical music, could go no further."

"Consider a pair of electrons which interact above a quiescent Fermi sphere with an interaction of the kind that might be expected due to the phonon and the screened Coulomb fields. If there is a net attraction between the electrons, it turns out that they can form a bound state, though their total energy is larger than zero. The properties of a noninteracting system of such bound pairs are very suggestive of those which could produce a superconducting state."

"The CIA came to us one day and said 'we would like information about what's going to happen at some coordinates... next Thursday.' This was on a Monday...they wanted us to look 3 days into the future and describe what's happening... Swann said... this looks like a big pyrotechnics display... like the fourth of July, big hemispherical display of fireworks with beautiful color traces up in the air and a bunch of trucks in the far distance...[then] The CIA could see from what he had drawn and from what they had... into the future...The CIA knew the Chinese were planning an atomic bomb test and from what Swann had drawn, that they would carry out the test and that it would fail."

"I have no doubt that ESP is a non-local ability independent of space and time. What that means is that we misapprehend the nature of the spacetime we’re living in."

"Very hard for a skeptic to say that didn’t happen if the president is saying these guys in California found the airplane. We did many things like that."

"I don't think there is a final theory of anything. It's theories all the way down."

"Don't pay too much attention to that Nobel Prize. They have to be capricious — they have to be. And that means that people fully deserving the award don't get it."

"I have been working in cosmology for 55 years ... I'm the last man standing, so to speak, from those early days."

"Another somewhat confusing usage is the name "the big bang" for the standard model. It is not appropriate, because it connotes a spatially isolated event, an explosion, that marked the start of everything. ... But the name has a very evident appeal and I expect that people will continue to use it."

"A solid stores energy in the vibrations of the atoms about their equilibrium positions. In the simplest approximation, which Einstein considered, each atom vibrates with the same frequency, ν, in each of three dimensions, so a solid containing N atoms can be thought of as 3N one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillators."

"The n-point correlation functions have proved useful not only as descriptive statistics but also as dynamic variables in the Newtonian theory of the evolution of clustering. ... The functions are generalized to mass correlation functions in position and momentum, and the BBGKY hierarchy of equations for their evolution is derived. This yields a new way to analyze the evolution of mass clustering in an expanding universe."

""There's no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense hurricanes, and supertyphoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.'"

"According to , “Professor Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.”"

"this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming."

"At the other end of the spectrum are stories that it's too late, that it's all over, that there's nothing left to do. Misinterpretations of the data lead some to declare that the Earth itself is going to die or human beings are going to die out in the near future, stories that clash with what the evidence tells us. They make people feel terrible, and they make them passive. Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios."

"...If we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road. (2019)"

"We have stressed that the cosmological constant (i.e. the dark energy) presents potentially the most striking failure of naturalness. One might hope to solve this problem by introducing new degrees of freedom. Supersymmetry helps to some extent."

"The only string theories we really understand well have exact supersymmetry."

"It has often been said that if Christ were to return to earth, he would be shocked at many of the things which have been done in his name, and horrified at the bloody fights between different sects of persons who call themselves his followers."

"Buddha and Confucius have had an approximately equal influence upon the World. Both lived at about the same tme, and the number of their adherents has not been too different. I have chosen to place Buddha before Confucius for two reasons: first, the advent of Communism in China seems to have greatly diminished Confucius influence; and second, the failure of Confucianism to spread widely outside of China indicates how closely the idea of Confucius were grounded in pre-existing Chinese attitudes."

"But Confucianism was not merely the official philosophy of the Chinese administration. Confucius ideals were accepted by the majority of the Chinese people, and for over two thousand years deeply influenced their life and thought."