The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Mechanics Quotes
"Everyone since Galileo knew this, but it remained for Einstein to make this simple fact into a powerful new physical principle. The Equivalence Principle asserts that there is absolutely no difference between the effects of gravity and the effects of acceleration."
"The future ain’t what it used to be." - Yogi Berra
"In the absence of forces, every object moves through space-time along a straight world line."
"The gravitational force on any object is proportional to its mass."
"Space tells bodies how to move and bodies tell space how to curve." - John Wheeler
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." - Niels Bohr
"I think it’s safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics." - Richard Feynman
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future." - Pierre de Laplace
"Einstein," Bohr scolded, "don’t tell God what to do."
"Deterministic laws are not the only possibility. Random laws also are possible."
"A mostly deterministic law, with just a touch of randomness, is possible."
"In this case, a gambler could make a pretty good guess about the immediate future."
"The maximum amount of information that can be stuffed into a region of space is equal to the area of the region, not the volume."
"Entropy increases. That's the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
"Entropy is a measure of the number of arrangements that conform to some specific recognizable criterion."
"The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that entropy increases, is just a way of saying that as time goes on, we tend to lose track of the details."
"Quantum Mechanics never tells us what will happen; it tells us the probability that this or that will happen."
"Entropy counts the possible ways of arranging bits of energy."
"The entropy of a black hole, measured in bits, is proportional to the area of its horizon, measured in Planck units."
"The existence of such an 'uncertain photon' would convey only a single bit of information—namely, it's there, somewhere in the black hole."
"The combination of apparent uniformity and large entropy indicates something important."
"People like to be challenged; they just don’t like to be bored."
"Every bit of information that ever fell into the black hole would remain tightly sealed in the infinitesimally small lockbox."
"The Principle of Relativity, which we associate so closely with Einstein, really goes back to Newton and, even further, to Galileo."
"The Equivalence Principle: The effects of gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable from one another."
"Having two incompatible theories of nature is intellectually intolerable and the General Theory of Relativity must be made compatible with Quantum Mechanics."
"I’m a theoretical physicist, but I can’t talk about it."
"The obvious reply, 'I’m a theoretical physicist,' usually leads to another question, 'What kind of physics do you do?'"
"I’d like to say that I work on the fundamental laws of nature, but that sounds pretentious."
"The question is, How do we rescue physics from the anarchy of information loss?"
"Nothing is both heavy and light at the same time, so how can both theories be important in the same context?"
"It’s unreasonable to think that a mere point could possess so much structure and variety."
"Gravity may be the most important force holding those particles together."
"The stretched horizon is a standard concept in black hole physics."
"In physics, a contradiction is only a contradiction if it leads to inconsistent experimental results."
"I still don’t know what it means to be invited to the High Table."
"I am reasonably certain that I can tell red from white with my eyes closed."
"The undergraduates were seated at the lowest level, dressed in academic gowns."
"The meal was served by waiters who were far better dressed than I."
"To my left, an ancient British don was soon snoring in his soup."
"I could hardly help feeling that I was the butt of the story."
"I was left to enjoy a tasteless meal (boiled fish covered with white flour paste), completely cut off from any conversation."
"A large greensward, very well-groomed, occupied a place of honor in front of the main entrance."
"I was young to be a professor, but I was one."
"Things that a couple of decades earlier had offended me as classist snobbery now struck me as nothing more than pleasant hospitality and perhaps a bit of British eccentricity."
"The notoriously bad British food had definitely improved."
"Cam? Bridge? Cambridge? Was it possible that I was on the site of the original bridge?"
"His name was Goodfriend, probably anglicized from Gutefreund a generation earlier."
"King’s College Chapel is God’s house in Cambridge."
"Even I—a scientist with not a religious bone in my body—found a certain hollowness in my belief."
"The incongruous mix of religious and scientific traditions."
"Newton was a Christian, and a passionate religious believer at that."
"The graviton is a closed string most closely resembling a miniature glueball."
"It was Stephen’s debilitating disease that gave him a sudden, powerful zest for life."
"Stephen said that getting ill—cripplingly ill—was the best thing that could have happened to him."
"Black Hole Complementarity and the Holographic Principle were certainly surprising, even shocking."
"The maximum entropy in a region of space is one bit per Planck area."
"String Theory says that everything in the world is made of microscopic, one-dimensional elastic strings."
"The Uncertainty Principle makes these strings vibrate and fluctuate with zero point motion."
"String Theory requires nine dimensions and space is observed to have only three."
"Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics."
"Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the mathematical theory of quarks and gluons."
"The most massive thing that can be squeezed into the region is a black hole, whose horizon coincides with the boundary."
"A paradox having to do with Darwinian evolution. How is it possible that human beings have evolved so powerful an impulse to create irrational belief systems?"
"The notion that one or more dimensions of space may be curled up into tiny geometries, and are therefore too small to detect, is a common theme of much modern high-energy physics."
"All modern theories of elementary particles make use of some form of extra dimensions to provide the missing machinery that makes particles complicated."
"Life in only one dimension is very constricted. With freedom to move only along a line, the Linelanders invariably bump into one another."
"The special geometric spaces that string theorists use to compactify the six extra dimensions are called Calabi Yau manifolds, and there are millions of them, no two of which are the same."
"Our universe is a world not just of space, time, and particles, but also of forces."
"Electrical forces acting between charged particles can move bits of paper and dust, but more important, these same forces keep atomic electrons in their orbits around nuclei."
"According to Feynman’s theory, all matter juggles, not just electric charges."
"On average, it takes more time than the entire age of the universe for an electron to emit a single graviton."
"String Theory may or may not be the right theory of nature, but it had shown that Stephen’s arguments could not be correct."
"Imagine zooming in on a boundary point of Circle Limit IV and then blowing it up so that the edge looks extremely straight."
"Each square or cube is equipped with its own clock. The rate at which the clocks run depends on which layer they are in."
"The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface."
"Everything inside a region of space can be described by bits of information restricted to the boundary."
"Maldacena argued that two mathematical worlds that seem totally dissimilar are in fact exactly the same."
"An inability to recognize the dimensionality of space would constitute an extremely dangerous perceptual disorder."
"Quantum Field Theory is a special case of Quantum Mechanics, and information in Quantum Mechanics can never be destroyed."
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
"The breakdown of concepts such as simultaneity and determinism are no more than obscure oddities that only a few physicists are interested in."
"In every direction that we look, galaxies are passing the point at which they are moving away from us faster than light can travel."
"The more we discover, the less we seem to know. That’s physics in a nutshell."