Photons Quotes

• Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.

  Max Planck

  Intelligent, Curves, Light

  70 Copy quote

• I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Light, Play, Names

  54 Copy quote

• Light is something like raindrops each little lump of light is called a photon and if the light is all one color, all the "raindrops" are the same.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Light, Color, Raindrops

  Richard P. Feynman (2014). “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, p.14, Princeton University Press

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photons come out of nowhere, they cannot be stored, they can barely be pinned down in time, and they have no home in space whatsoever. That is, light occupies no volume and has no mass. The similarity between a thought and a photon is very deep. Both are born in a region beyond space and time where nature controls all processes in that void which is full of creative intelligence.

  Deepak Chopra

  Home, Space, Light

  25 Copy quote

• Photons have neither morals nor visas.

  David J. Farber

  Moral, Visa

  11 Copy quote

• Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.

  Kim Stanley

  Clouds, Light, Rocks

  14 Copy quote

• Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Wave, Genuine

  8 Copy quote

• If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, 'It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.'

  Phil Plait

  Kids, Eye, Blue

  "Bad Astronomy". Book by Phil Plait, 2002.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every now and then, I'll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You've met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes.

  Marc Ian Barasch

  Life, Acceptance, Compassion

  13 Copy quote

• Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

  Woody Allen

  Witty, Humorous, Catholic

  16 Copy quote

• There is one simplification at least. Electrons behave ... in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Way, Behave, Electrons

  10 Copy quote

• The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

  Brian Greene

  Eye, Years, Naked

  8 Copy quote

• The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, World, Fields

  11 Copy quote

• What we see is the solution to a computational problem, our brains compute the most likely causes from the photon absorptions within our eyes.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Eye, Brain, Causes

  11 Copy quote

• There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Journey, Years

  9 Copy quote

• When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only on the surface.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Glasses, Kind, Results

  Richard P. Feynman (2014). “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, p.17, Princeton University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you - the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

  Tom Robbins

  Dark, Thinking, Soul

  9 Copy quote

• We made love. How pedestrian the words look-trite, worn, practically featureless with use-but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? That creation? That magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow... a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky... gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light... as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers.

  Ken Kesey

  Sex, Moon, Sky

  7 Copy quote

• A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

  Michael Crichton

  Real, Silly, Moving

  Michael Crichton (1997). “The Lost World”, Knopf

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Glasses, Air, People

  "Written on the Body". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 1992.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Neutrinos have mass? i didn't even know they're Catholic!" Robert to Vittoria

  Dan Brown

  Catholic, Physics, Neutrinos

  59 Copy quote

• The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

  Douglas Adams

  Heart, Simple, Night

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.77, Pan Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

  David Eagleman

  Light, Cells, Brain

  4 Copy quote

• It is to be emphasized that no matter how many [amplitude] arrows we draw, add, or multiply, our objective is to calculate a single final arrow for the event . Mistakes are often made by physics students at first because they do not keep this important point in mind. They work for so long analyzing events involving a single photon that they begin to think that the arrow is somehow associated with the photon [rather than with the event].

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mistake, Thinking, Arrows

  Richard P. Feynman (2014). “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, p.75, Princeton University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.

  L. Neil Smith

  Real, Ignorance, Self

  8 Copy quote