Physics Quote of the Day (November 15 - November 21)

"A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty." Voltaire, born 21 November 1694.

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science." Edwin Hubble, born 20 November 1889.

"The difficulty, as in all this work, is to find a notation which is both concise and intelligible to at least two people of whom one may be the author." Paul Matthews, born 19 November 1919.

"A physicist must be able to saw with a file and to file with a saw." August Kundt, born 18 November 1839.

"In science, it is not speed that is the most important. It is the dedication, the commitment, the interest and the will to know something and to understand it — these are the things that come first." Eugene Wigner, born 17 November 1902.

"Nothing is more incontestable than the existence of our sensations;" Jean le Rond d'Alembert, born 16 November 1717.

"Here is truly a Hole in Heaven." William Herschel, born 15 November 1738.

Physics Quote of the Day (November 8 - November 14)

"You can forget facts but you cannot forget understanding !" Eric Mazur, born 14 November 1954.

"Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions." Amory Lovins, born 13 November 1947.

"... a young author who believes himself capable of great things would usually do well to secure the favourable recognition of the scientific world by work whose scope is limited, and whose value is easily judged, before embarking upon higher flights." John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, born 12 November 1842.

"As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree." Hugh Everett, born 11 November 1930.

"It is a fantastic letter. Very understated. He calls it an optical maser, it’s as if a maser was made to run in the optical. No flamboyant phrase, just straightforward science." Peter Franken, born 10 November 1928.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." Carl Sagan, born 9 November 1934.

"... electronics is a fascinating field that I continue to find fulfilling. The field is still growing rapidly, and the opportunities that are ahead are at least as great as they were when I graduated from college. My advice is to get involved and get started." Jack Kilby, born 8 November 1923.

Physics Quote of the Day (November 1 - November 7)

"Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research." Marie Curie, born 7 November 1867.

"A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life." David L. Webster, born 6 November 1888.

"In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the world "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d²x/dy²) much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plainman, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change." John Burdon Haldane, born 5 November 1892.

"If you really look at it, I was trying to sell a dream ... There was very little I could put in concrete to tell these people it was really real." Charles K. Kao, born 4 November 1933.

"It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us." Nick Holonyak, born 3 November 1928.

"The beauty of physics lies in the extent to which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity." Melvin Schwartz, born 2 November 1932.

"... real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed." Robert B. Laughlin, born 1 November 1950.

Physics Quote of the Day (October 25 - October 31)

"Sometimes one can improve the theories in the sense of discovering a quicker, more efficient way of doing a given calculation." John Pople, born 31 October 1925.

"Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts." Jean Rostand, born 30 October 1894.

"Science leads to great achievements, which, quite rightly, fill of joy those who seek the truth, but if pursued, teaches us that we must seek other sources of ultimate truth and find answers to existential questions about the meaning of life and the mystery of death." Franco Bassani, born 29 October 1929.

"... the basis of anything is education, so that people not only become qualified, but essentially become able to create new knowledge." José Leite Lopes, born 28 October 1918.

"Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians. These parallel global warmings -- observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth -- can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance." Khabibullo Abdusamatov, born 27 October 1940.

"The gravitational force is the oldest force known to man and the least understood." Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, born 26 October 1938.

"... an author never does more damage to his readers than when he hides a difficulty." Évariste Galois, born 25 October 1811.

Physics Quote of the Day (October 18 - October 24)

"The real point of honor [for a scientist] is not to be always right. It is to dare to propose new ideas, and then check them." Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, born 24 October 1932.

"...while I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical necessity. Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure." Felix Bloch, born 23 October 1905.

"Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before." Clinton Davisson, born 22 October 1881.

"I would like to help dreamers as they find it difficult to get on in life." Alfred Nobel, born 21 October 1833.

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination." John Dewey, born 20 October 1859.

"It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature.… What is intelligible is also beautiful." Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, born 19 October 1910.

"In quantum physics, however, each observation implies an intervention in the observed. Because of the quantum physical laws of nature, a change of state of the observed is inevitably coupled to the observation process. So it's not a situation independent from the experiment that is observed, but we ourselves call forth the facts (or compel them to go in a certain direction to a disambiguation), that then become an observation." Pascual Jordan, born 18 October 1902.

Physics Quote of the Day (October 11 - October 17)

"...the ultimate objective of teaching physics is promoting a sound physical thinking and not merely tackling a list of topics." Győző Zemplén, born 17 October 1879.

"Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand." John Polkinghorne, born 16 October 1930.

"Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension." C. P. Snow, born 15 October 1905.

"We don't want support for scientific research just to keep scientists busy: we want scientists to be looked upon by the public as people who can do things for them that they can't do themselves." J. C. McLennan, born 14 October 1867.

"Opinions derived from long experience are exceedingly valuable, and outweigh all others, while they are consistent with facts and with each other; but they are worse than useless when they lead, as in this instance, to directly opposite opinions." Peter Barlow, born 13 October 1776.

"It frequently happens that a great discovery supplies the wanting links between a number of obscure facts, and thus adds quite as much to our knowledge by its indirect bearings as by the positive additions it makes to the general stock." Josiah Cooke, born 12 October 1827.

"Should there really be suns in the whole infinite space, they can be at approximately the same distance from one another, or distributed over galaxies, hence would be in infinite quantities, and consequently the whole sky should be as bright as the sun. Clearly, each line which can conceivably be drawn from our eye will necessarily end on one of the stars and each point on the sky would send us starlight, that is, sunlight." Heinrich Olbers, born 11 October 1758.

FQXi essay contest statistics and quotes

I took profit of last week and weekend to acquaint myself with the other essays handling the question "What's ultimately possible in physics". I read a dozen of them extensively as well as all abstracts and began to organize my evaluations. I voted for two of them but will leave a definite rate for the others after having checked consistency with respect to a broader set of essays. The fact that strikes me, is how low community voters (mainly authors) score each other. The scale runs from 1 to 10, but presently the highest rating is 4.4. That's detrimental for a healthy rating system because we loose in gradation subtleties.

As for the statistics: 114 essays were submitted by 1 woman and 113 man. There is much to do in order to establish gender parity in physics! From the information I gathered, the great majority have US citizenship (43 authors), Germany (10) and India (9) are also strongly represented, as well as Canada (5), Romania (5), Italy (5) and the Netherlands (5, including mine). Russia and UK have each 4 submissions. The rest comes from Australia (2), New Zealand (2), Spain (2), Croatia (2), Slovenia (2), Austria (1), Belgium (1), Brasil (1), Chili (1), Greece (1), Iraq (1), Korea (1), Moldova (1), Mexico (1), South Africa (1), Sweden (1), Serbia (1) and 2 which I couldn't deduce from the information they gave. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because I assumed US citizenship for US residents if not mentioned otherwise. There are no submissions from my country of residence. What am I doing here in Paris if there is nobody to discuss foundational questions with ;-) !

Some authors gave me agreement for quoting them, so here are some interesting quotes:

From “Ultimately anything is possible” by Hrvoje Nikolic, the shortest essay (if you have little time, read it).
“we can never be sure that the laws of physics we know are the final ones, so we always must admit that anything is ultimately possible”.

From “Mechanics of a Self-Creating Universe” by Anton W. M. Biermans, a “cursory overview of the first insights to come out of an investigation into the question whether a universe can create itself out of nothing”.
“If an electron cannot express its charge if there is no other charge in the universe, then it couldn't be charged itself.”

From “ant among giants. . .a fable” by Richard P. Dolan, an enjoyable and entertaining essay, with the message that physicists should listen to people outside of their tribe.
“The ant found its chilly reception perfectly proper and understandable, but always experienced a feeling of frustration when some giant publicly expressed ignorance on a question to which the ant thought it had the answer.”
“the physicists were ensnared in a dense thicket of mathematics, desperately trying to get out by going deeper into the thicket. Only the string theorists thought they had hacked their way out of the thicket, but what they found was a vast landscape of universes that had no predictive power and couldn’t be tested—the end of science.”

From “Ignoramus et Ignorabimus” by Alfred Tang, making the point that physics and theology could benefit one from the other.
“Very often scientific discoveries are made when physics interacts with other disciplines (such as biology). In cross-discipline research, physicists are forced to think outside of the box.”
“precision is only possible if and only if we know exactly what we want to say in closed form. As we approach the limit of physics, we often do not even know what to think. Therefore the exactness of the mathematical language may easily lead to highly specialized rabbit trails down into theoretical blind alleys. When we do not know what we are talking about, it is helpful to take a step back to look at the forest instead of the leaves by thinking in more general terms with common language to develop the proper attitudes. Loquaciousness is perhaps the proper technique for developing attitudes. Proper attitudes constrain the theory space so that theoreticians do not waste time populating the theoretical landscape as in the case of superstring theory.”

From “To be or not to be strictly deterministic?” by Stefan Weckbach, stating that physical laws and consciousness belong to different realms.
“truths can evolve out of beliefs”
“there is no direct path from our abstract knowledge to ultimate reality”

From “On the Impossibility of Time Travel” by JCN Smith, demonstrating that a particular time is defined by the configuration of the universe.
“the changes we observe (as well as those we donʼt observe) are the flow of time. If the configuration of the universe did not change, there would be no flow of time.”

From “Quantum mechanics from a stochastic least action principle” by Joakim Munkhammar, giving a unified vision of classical and quantum least action principle.
“the ultimate possibilities in physics could more clearly be visualized with a better foundation for quantum mechanics.”

From “At the Frontier of Knowledge” by Sabine Hossenfelder, giving good reasons to say that it is impossible to say what's ultimately possible.
“Physicists have a love-hate relationship with no-go theorems”
“Despite long efforts, no progress has been made. This situation is one that seems to bother physicists today more than ever due to the lack of breakthroughs in fundamental physics that has lasted several decades now. This is even more frustrating since meanwhile the world around us seems to change in a faster pace every day.”
“proofs are only about the mathematical properties of certain objects in their assumptions. A physical theory that describes the real world necessarily also needs a connection between these mathematical objects and the corresponding objects of the real world.”
“What we can thus state with certainty at any time is merely “To our best current knowledge...””