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The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything QUOTES

The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything QUOTES

1 " In a galaxy far, far away, at a time when the Earth hosted nothing bigger than a simple bacterium, two monster black holes, locked in a death-spiral, swung around each other one last time. As they kissed and coalesced, three whole solar masses vanished, reappearing instantly as a tsunami of a warped space-time, which raced outwards at the speed of light. For an instant its power was fifty times greater than that of all the stars in the Universe put together. "

― Marcus Chown , The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything

2 " Now, at the outset of the twenty-first century, we stand on the verge of a new revolution. The search for a deeper theory than Einstein’s – a quantum theory of gravity – is the greatest endeavour ever embarked upon by physics. Already, there are tantalising glimpses of a new world view. "

― Marcus Chown , The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything

3 " whether God had any choice in the creation of the World’. "

― Marcus Chown , The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything

4 " But, in 1927, Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer in the US and George Thomson in Scotland demonstrated that electrons could interfere with each other, their quantum waves reinforcing and cancelling each other out just like ripples overlapping on a pond. The irony is that George Thomson’s father was ‘J. J.’ Thomson, who had discovered the electron. The father won the Nobel Prize for proving that the electron is a particle; the son won the Nobel Prize for showing that it isn’t. "

― Marcus Chown , The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything