Physics of the Impossible QUOTES

21 " First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

22 " Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than the speed of light! Because these two electrons are “entangled, "

― , Physics of the Impossible

23 " Since Einstein derived his famous equation, literally millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

24 " [L]iking" something is very important evolutionarily, because most things are harmful to us. Of the millions of objects that we bump into every day, only a handful are beneficial to us. Hence to "like" something is to make a decision between one out of the tiny fraction of things that can help us over against the millions of things that might harm us. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

25 " It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off. —WOODY ALLEN "

― , Physics of the Impossible

26 " It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world’s smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. (This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the range of the human ear.) "

― , Physics of the Impossible

27 " بسبب فقر فارادي الشديد في صباه فقد كان أمياً بالرياضيات ونتيجة لذلك لم تكن دفاتره زاخرة بالمعادلات الرياضية بل الأشكال المرسومة فقط لخطوط القوة والتي تعد أحد أهم المفاهيم في العلم كله ..
ومن المفارقة بأن افتقاره لتعلم الرياضيات قاده إلى صنع تلك الأشكال التي توجد الآن في قلب الفيزياء. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

28 " One day , would it be possible to walk through walls ? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? TO READ OTHER PEOPLE'S MIND ?
To become INVISIBLE ? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space??

Since I was a child , I've always been fascinated by these questions. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

29 " Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass.

If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote.

There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon. "

― , Physics of the Impossible

30 " Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations.

Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school.

Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself...is an electromagnetic disturbance. "

― , Physics of the Impossible