Top 80 Electron Quotes
#1. On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron.
Pieter Zeeman
#2. The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated.
Werner Heisenberg
#3. My own interest in basic aspects of electron transfer between metal complexes became active only after I came to the University of Chicago in 1946.
Henry Taube
#4. Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.
Michael Flynn
#6. Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".
John Gribbin
#7. You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
Craig Venter
#8. It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.
Stephen Hawking
#9. Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.
John Kessel
#10. My aunt Julie was a production manager, and she heard of an opening. Some show was looking for children to run around the house or whatever. I auditioned and got the part, and I showed up in all of my monstrous energy, bouncing everywhere like an electron.
Xavier Dolan
#11. The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave, and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.
Louis De Broglie
#12. One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
D.H. Lawrence
#13. In basic research, the use of the electron microscope has revealed to us the complex universe of the cell, the basic unit of life.
Gunter Blobel
#14. If Feynman could see beauty as the inspiration for the theory of the rainbow, and if an electron could behave like a wave, and light like a particle, then the little contradiction of Leonard flitting among different subfields of physics, or even among varied careers, would not shake the universe.
Anonymous
#15. It's one thing when you plug into a socket in the wall and electrons flow," said Bob Kahn. "It's another thing when you have to figure out, for every electron, which direction it takes.
Katie Hafner
#16. You will get your difficulties with the point electron.
Paul Ehrenfest
#17. If a symmetry between electrons and electron neutrinos is like comparing apples to oranges, trying to connect fermions with bosons is like comparing bananas to orangutans.
Sean Carroll
#18. Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement. Just as the electron is the last unit of matter discernible to the scientist. DESIRE is the seed of all achievement; the starting place, back of which there is nothing, or at least there is nothing of which we have any knowledge.
Napoleon Hill
#19. An electron accelerated to .9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999 times the speed of light would hit you with the same impact as a Mack truck traveling at normal speed.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#20. Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork
a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyreal choreography.
Steven Millhauser
#21. The magnetic cleavage of the spectral lines is dependent on the size of the charge of the electron, or, more accurately, on the ratio between the mass and the charge of the electron.
Pieter Zeeman
#22. When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.
Michio Kaku
#23. Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape.
James Bamford
#24. Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest.
Pieter Zeeman
#25. I used to say the evening that I developed the first x-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.
Dorothy Hodgkin
#26. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron.
Michio Kaku
#27. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricty goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires.
Dave Barry
#28. The existence of both (electron and pebble) depends upon the context created by our thoughts, our language, our theories, and our interaction (experimentation) with our external world.
Felix Alba-Juez
#29. On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.
Dan Shechtman
#30. Mysteries like these repeating cycles make it very interesting to be a theoretical physicist: Nature gives us such wonderful puzzles! Why does She repeat the electron at 206 times and 3,640 times its mass?
Richard Feynman
#32. There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.
Arthur Eddington
#33. Two atoms are walking down the street. One says, "Wait, I think I lost an electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first one says, "Yes, I'm positive.
Greg Ross
#34. Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.
Robert A. Heinlein
#35. There can never be two or more equivalent electrons in an atom, for which in a strong field the values of all the quantum numbers n, k1, k2 and m are the same. If an electron is present, for which these quantum numbers (in an external field) have definite values, then this state is 'occupied.'
Wolfgang Pauli
#36. An electron is an electron, but you can decide where to send your electric-bill payment. You can't redirect the electrons, but you can your dollars. The dollars will drive generation choices.
Ralph Cavanagh
#37. The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).
David J. Griffiths
#38. According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined.
Pieter Zeeman
#39. Everything in this world, as well as the world itself, strives for balance and harmony. Electron reaches proton, male tends to female, light replaces darkness, life is balanced by death, and vice versa. And evil on one scale will inevitably lead to the appearance of good on the other.
Alexandr Iscenco
#40. If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#41. The math says you can either know the position of an electron or the momentum, but never both.
Ted Kosmatka
#42. The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.
James Randi
#43. I think we're part of a greater wisdom that we will ever understand; a higher order, call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all. It just is.
George Carlin
#44. An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.
Arthur Eddington
#45. Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.
Steven Weinberg
#46. The electron is first of all your concept of the electron.
Nhat Hanh
#47. One day I went up to my mom and I said, 'Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher - a betatron - in the garage?' And my mom stared at me, and she said, 'Sure. Why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage.'
Michio Kaku
#48. Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.
Brian Greene
#49. Now all oscillatory movements of such an electron can be conceived of as being split up into force, and two circular oscillations perpendicular to this direction rotating in opposite directions.
Pieter Zeeman
#50. The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom - that is, the ionization of the atom - means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.
Johannes Stark
#52. We have learnt through experience that when an electrical ray strikes the surface of an atom, an electron, and in some circumstances a second and even a third electron, can be detached.
Johannes Stark
#53. This is our world now The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
Loyd Blankenship
#54. Can quantum mechanics represent the fact that an electron finds itself approximately in a given place and that it moves approximately with a given velocity, and can we make these approximations so close that they do not cause experimental difficulties?
Werner Heisenberg
#55. The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#56. In size the electron bears the same relation to an atom that a baseball bears to the earth. Or, as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it, if a hydrogen atom were magnified to the size of a church, an electron would be a speck of dust in that church.
Waldemar Kaempffert
#58. Information is the new atom or electron, the fundamental building block of the universe ... We now see the world as entirely made of information: it's bits all the way down.
Bryan Appleyard
#59. Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.
John Desmond Bernal
#60. In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.
George Emil Palade
#61. In the absence of a magnetic field the period of all these oscillations is the same. But as soon as the electron is exposed to the effect of a magnetic field, its motion changes.
Pieter Zeeman
#62. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.
Dean Radin
#63. I hitched my wagon to an electron rather than the proverbial star.
David Sarnoff
#64. I always imagined myself somehow as an electron around some atom, and you're just, like, bouncing around and spinning. There was a never-ending supply of places to go, people to see, things to do, and fitting it all in became kind of an art.
Tom Freston
#65. When, in 1949, I decided to join the little band of early explorers who had followed Albert Claude in his pioneering expeditions, electron microscopy was still in its infancy.
Christian De Duve
#66. Getting closer to someone doesn't necessarily clarify anything. It's like staring at an electron micrograph. You're closer but nothing's any simpler.
Sonja Yoerg
#67. The electron is a theory. But the theory is so good we can almost consider them real.
Richard P. Feynman
#68. No. I had successfully solved the difficulty of finding a description of the electron which was consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. Of course, when you solve one difficulty, other new difficulties arise. You then try to sove them. You can never solve all difficulties at once.
Paul Dirac
#69. Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.
Sam Kean
#70. The chemist in America has in general been content with what I have called a loafer electron theory. He has imagined the electrons sitting around on dry goods boxes at every corner [viz. the cubic atom], ready to shake hands with, or hold on to similar loafer electrons in other atoms.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#71. It's more like every electron in every atom in the universe paused, breathed in deeply, assessed the situation, and then reversed its course, spinning backward, or the other way, which was the right way all along. And afterward, the universe was exactly the same, but infinitely more right.
Lydia Netzer
#72. The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
Richard P. Feynman
#73. I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.
Albert Einstein
#74. The network of trenches and artillery below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an electron has.
Anthony Doerr
#75. I can't think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.
Margaret Atwood
#76. A duet in code and electron.
Age and youth and cynicism and hope.
Amie Kaufman
#77. We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.
Fabiola Gianotti
#78. I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.
Paul Kalanithi
#79. What we learn is that the scientist is as important a part of this experiment as the electron, and that the scientist and the electron are in fact connected. This experiment is the cornerstone of the holistic universe theory.
Danny Scheinmann
#80. Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united ...
D.H. Lawrence