“Beneath this, though, is the theory of the quantum vacuum in which, supposedly, virtual particles and their mirror-image anti-particles constantly pop into existence and then annihilate one another.”
Armantrout, Rae. Collected Prose. San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2007. p. 79.
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Singing Horse Press
“The second difference is that the nucleus contains two kinds of particles, neutrons and protons, each with intrinsic spin. We shall assume that the nuclear potential is the same for protons and neutrons. This assumption is now known to be in agreement with the evidence of many high-energy experiments, but at the time of the nuclear shell model development it was supported most strongly by the fact that the magic numbers were the same for nuetrons and protons.”
Goeppert Mayer, Maria. “The Shell Model.” Transcript of speech delivered at the Auditorium of the University of Oslo, December 12, 1963.
Catalog Record
The Nobel Prize
"There are essentially two ways in which physicists at present seek to obtain a consisten picture of atomic nucleus. The first, the basic approach, is to study the elementary particles, their properties and mutual interaction. Thus one hopes to obtain a knowledge of the nuclear forces."
Goeppert Mayer, Maria. “The Shell Model.” Transcript of speech delivered at the Auditorium of the University of Oslo, December 12, 1963.
Catalog Record
The Nobel Prize
“Typically, researchers put the crude preparations in a large centrifuge tube and then use a powerful spin cycle that forces the phage particles and other debris to sink to the bottom of the tube, leaving the debris behind.”
Strathdee, Steffanie A., and Thomas L. Patterson. The Perfect Predator: A Scientists Race to save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir. London: Hachette Books, 2020. p. 188.
theperfectpredator.com
“I see no more need of assuming such a substance for organic beings than of assuming a special substance in water which gives ice crystals their form when water freezes. According to my view the problem of why the particles of living material get together as they do to make bodies of the shape we see everywhere among plants and animals, is a problem of the same class though of vastly greater complexity, as that of why the particles of water get together to make crystals of the many shapes in which ice crystals occur.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. pp. 93-94.
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Google Books
“Undoubtedly many familiar kinds of energy, as osmosis, capillary and surface tension, and chemical affinity in any of its varieties know outside of organisms are in operation and contribute importantly to the results; but it is certainly not merely undemonstrable but practically unimaginable how any one of these or all of them working together could so transform and arrange the particles of a frog's eggs and the food particles taken up by a tadpole as to produce a full-grown frog.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 92.
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Google Books
“It is the fact that we biologists are forever finding more and more, and smaller and smaller particles entering into the make-up of all the living bodies we know, that led me a few years ago to the conception of relative, or standardized reality.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 74.
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Google Books
“Chemistry is particularly instructive since its ‘ultimate atoms’ have been resolved into still smaller bodies, though the extreme minuteness of the small particles with which it deals, has made it impossible thus far to secure very definite observational knowledge of the constitutive attributes of these bodies.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life: Three Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 74.
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Google Books
“It means that the magnetizable body is made up of minute particles each one of which, though not in reality a magnet, is so constituted that it can become one.”
Ritter, William Emerson. The Higher Usefulness of Science, and Other Essays. Boston, MA: Gorham Press, 1918. p. 67.
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Google Books
“It doesn’t have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It’s damn near a vacuum here.”
Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014. p. 374.
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Random House
“The slope lengthened until a new balance point was reached, one defined by the complex interactions of countless tiny particles and their ability to maintain an angled shape.”
Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014. p. 364.
Catalog Record
Random House
“Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them here, now.”
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. p. 4.
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W.W. Norton
“And it was while these features were taking form in the depths of the range, the particles of the rocks marching to their appointed places in the dark with reference to the coming beauty, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky marching to the same music assembled to bring them to the light.”
Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition. Vol. I. The Mountains of California. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. p. 21.
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Internet Archive
“And it was while these features were taking form in the depths of the range, the particles of the rocks marching to their appointed places in the dark with reference to the coming beauty, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky marching to the same music assembled to bring them to the light.”
Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition. Vol. I. The Mountains of California. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. p. 21.
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Internet Archive
“And yet - 'here too the gods are present': in a hydroelectric plant on the banks of the Rhine, in subatomic particles, in Adidas shoes as well as in the old wooden clogs hollowed out by hand, in agribusiness as well as in timeworn landscapes, in shopkeepers' calculations as well as in Holderlin's heartrending verse.”
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. p. 66.
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Harvard University Press
“It is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand narrative, the physics of subatomic particles to a text, subway systems to rhetorical devices, all social structures to discourse.”
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. p. 64.
Catalog Record
Harvard University Press
“Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them here, now.”
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. p. 4.
Catalog Record
W.W. Norton