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1 " [C]ritics of Canadian securities regulators sometimes point out that a number of high-profile US securities cases have resulted in prison sentences for the offenders, while incarceration for Canadian securities law violators seems very rare...[A]s has often been noted, incarceration is far more frequent in the United States for crimes of all kinds, yet it is not usually suggested that this is proof that the United States is generally a safer place to live than Canada. "
― Paul Halpern , Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis
2 " [T]he ABCP market was built on a fatal flaw: a significant mismatch between the duration of the underlying assets (long-term) and the duration of the paper itself (short-term). While this structure is not unusual -- banks use it all the time -- the crucial difference is that banks have a strong liquidity provider in the event of a problem: the Bank of Canada. The trusts, however, were left in limbo. "
3 " So why didn't ABCP investors -- at least the large institutional investors -- have a better grasp of the uncertain nature of market disruption triggers as defined under Canadian-style liquidity? Probably because the contracts were not available for review to investors wishing to purchase ABCP -- yet another example of the lack of transparency surrounding the distribution and sale of this product. "
4 " After the meeting, Guay met with Verville for a debriefing. Guay reports that Verville said that all investors would have to roll to avoid a market collapse. Guay told Verville that on Monday, at the first chance to roll its maturing paper, the Caisse should not be the only investor rolling in a particular trust. If that happened, it would end up in a worse position than not rolling at all. "
5 " For the purposes of this book, however, the relevant question is much narrower: the issue is not whether, in general, a national securities regulator is preferable to Canada's fragmented provincial securities regulatory system. The key question, for our purposes, is this: Would a national securities regulator have made a material difference in this specific case? Framed this way, the question is much more challenging and the answer far less certain. "
6 " Finding any semblance of unity would require extraordinary pattern-recognition skills, a keen imagination, and a hearty sense of humor "
― Paul Halpern , Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles
7 " Spinoza had argued that God, synonymous with nature, was immutable and eternal, leaving no room for chance. Agreeing with Spinoza, Einstein sought the invariant rules governing nature’s mechanisms. He was absolutely determined to prove that the world was absolutely determined. "
― Paul Halpern , Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics
8 " objects were governed by their interactions "
9 " Yarn is fundamental, knots are not. Similarly, Hilbert and Mike envisioned a natural order in which the geometry of fields is foremost and twists manifest themselves as particles. "
10 " In their later years, each (Einstein and Schrödinger) hoped to find a unified field theory that would fill in the gaps of quantum physics and unite the forces of nature. By extending general relativity to include all of the natural forces, such a theory would replace matter with pure geometry - fulfilling the dream of the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number". "
― Paul Halpern
11 " They searched for unity almost in unison. (Einstein and Schrodinger) "
12 " What God has put asunder, man should not join together,(Pauli to Weyl) "
13 " One time when a group of dignitaries was visiting, Elsa implored Albert to dress up. He refused, stating that if they wanted to see him, he was there, but if they had come to see his clothes, they were in the closet. "
14 " By framing the special theory of relativity as a four-dimensional theory set in spacetime, Minkowski showed how time dilation and length contraction could be constructed as rotations that transform space into time. "
15 " In the early hours of April 18, Einstein's world line reached its final point- life's ultimate singularity. "
16 " Wheeler's brilliant student Richard Feynman had developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, called 'sum over histories', that generalized Hamilton's least-action principle to the study of how photons transfer between electrons and other charged particles to generate the electromagnetic force. In creating a force, the photon acts as what is called an 'exchange particle'. (Its existence is required through Weyl's gauge theory of electromagnetism.) Unlike in classical mechanics, in which particles travel along unique paths, Feynman showed how in quantum interactions all possible paths are taken, weighted by their probabilities to create a net result. "
17 " The lives of Einstein and Schrödinger inform is that even the most brilliant scientists are human "
18 " Who will be the next Einstein? Will his ingenious contributions ever be surpassed? Is there anyone brilliant enough to complete his dream of a unified theory of nature? "
19 " Rutherford showed how radio waves could travel long distances, penetrate walls, and magnetize iron. "
20 " The subcomponents were at first called different things, but eventually the physics community settled on the term 'quarks' chosen by Murray Gell-Mann for the way it sounded to him. He spotted the word in a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark's". As there are three quarks each in protons and neutrons (and in all particles in the category called baryons), the moniker seemed appropriate. "
