Paul Halpern > Quotes

“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

“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

“Can you imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance with the result that the equations of the perihelion movement of Mercury prove correct? I was speechless for several days with excitement.
(Einstein to Ehrenfest)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Rutherford showed how radio waves could travel long distances, penetrate walls, and magnetize iron.”
― Paul Halpern, Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles

“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

“objects were governed by their interactions”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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.”
― Paul Halpern , Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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?”
― Paul Halpern

“[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

“In short, believers in the standpoint that the entire universe runs like a perfect clock dismiss the notion that anything is fundamentally random.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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.”
― Paul Halpern, Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis

“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.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“One of the motifs of the cat paradox is the clash between what goes on at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. As Schrödinger described in his paper, uncertainty on an atomic scale becomes linked with fuzziness on a human scale. Because such macroscopic murkiness is never observed, microscopic indeterminacy similarly mustn't exist.”
― Paul Halpern

“He (Riemann) showed that there are three main ways space can be curved- positive curvature, negative curvature, and zero curvature. Thes correspond respectively to elliptic, hyperbolic, and Euclidean flat geometries.”
― Paul Halpern

“Hence, Einstein's equations beautifully connect the stuff of the universe with the shape of the universe.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Compared with this problem, the original theory of relativity is childish.
(Einstein to Sommerfeld on the gravitational problem)”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“[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.”
― Paul Halpern, Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis

“In the early hours of April 18, Einstein's world line reached its final point- life's ultimate singularity.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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.”
― Paul Halpern, Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis

“Patience is not a hallmark of the press, especially in the Internet age of rapid fire news reports. The media hungrily gobble content as long as they can make the case that it is new and interesting to the public. Unpublished reports, speculations, preliminary review process sometimes become as newsworthy as meticulously verified conclusions.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“By introducing non-Euclidean geometry to theoretical physics, Einstein would transform the field in extraordinary ways. The twelve-year-old clutching the geometry book would have no ways of knowing that his very hands would someday rewrite physical laws in a way that made the book obsolete.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“The lives of Einstein and Schrödinger inform is that even the most brilliant scientists are human”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“That May, Einstein excitedly informed a friend, "In the tranquility of my sickness, I have laid a wonderful egg in the area of general relativity. Whether the bird that will hatch from it will be vital and long-lived only the gods know. So far I am blessing my sickness that has endowed me with it.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“Two of the most important relationships in modern physics are Schrodinger's wave equation and Einstein's equation of general relativity. Strikingly, their domains are very different. While Schrodinger's equation describes the distribution and behavior of matter and energy throughout space and time, Einstein's equation shows how the fabric of space and time is itself molded by the distribution of matter and energy.”
― Paul Halpern

“Given how the standard model has shaped up it is amusing to think of all the newspaper pronouncements claiming Einstein's and Schrodinger's unified field theory proposals as ultimate descriptions of the universe. The picture of nature that has emerged in recent decades is radically different from what anyone in the World War II era anticipated clearly the universe has many surprises up its sleeve. Could it be that the new discoveries will someday make the standard model seem outdated?”
― Paul Halpern

“Einstein brilliantly realized that it would be possible to patch together a comprehensive theory of gravity from free falling reference frames, treating each as it were at rest. Within each framework, he noted, each object would move in a straight line unless deflected by external forces. However, when viewed from another framework, those straight lines might appear curved. That is why we see bodies taking curved paths because of gravity- because we are viewing their motion from our framework, not theirs.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

“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.”
― Paul Halpern, Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis

“Coincidentally, the solver of the riddle (how the speed of light appears to a moving observer) would be born in the year of Maxwell's death.”
― Paul Halpern

“The relationships (Maxwell's equations) are the epitome of mathematical consieness, compact enough to fit on a T-shirt yet powerful enough to describe all manner of electromagnetism.”
― Paul Halpern, Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics