Brian Clegg > Quotes

“Famously, Einstein said that his ‘happiest thought’ occurred here: ‘I was sitting in a chair in the Patent Office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled.’ By thinking of someone falling, for example in a plummeting lift, Einstein had realised that it was impossible to distinguish acceleration and the pull of gravity. And working through the mathematical implications of this made it clear that gravity was an effect that could be produced by a distortion of space and time.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“Newton’s law of gravitation. That’s all you need (with a spot of calculus to crunch the numbers) to work out how the Earth will orbit the Sun or how an apple will fall if you let it go at a certain height. The only trouble is that Newton had no idea how this gravity thing worked. His model was simply: ‘There is an attraction between bits of stuff, and let’s not bother about why.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“The year 1992 should have been remembered as the 700th anniversary of the death of a man who changed the world. Yet the occasion passed without note. Few know of the remarkable achievements of someone who, more than any other, can be said to have invented science.”
― Brian Clegg, Roger Bacon: The First Scientist

“why Newton’s apple fell. The apple isn’t moving at all at the start of the process, so why would changing the shape of space make it move? The wonderful answer is that massive objects don’t just warp space, they warp space and time. In Einstein’s world, space and time are united into the single entity, spacetime. In principle we should think of spacetime as a four-dimensional object – but that’s hard to envisage, so what we tend to do is to just use two space dimensions and one of time. (The third space dimension hasn’t gone away, we just don’t need to think of it.) When we speak of warping space or time, what happens is that the axis is no longer straight, but starts to curve.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“gravitational waves are fundamentally different. Not only is a gravitational wave a side-to-side, lateral wave like light, not a longitudinal wave like sound, but it isn’t a ripple through objects in spacetime; it passes through spacetime itself. When a gravitational wave passes by, spacetime squeezes and contracts. This oscillation influences matter, which exists in spacetime – but doesn’t require matter to be able to travel. It’s quite demeaning to gravitational waves to call their detection ‘hearing the sound of black holes in space’ as some have done. By comparison, sound is a trivial local effect. Gravitational waves make the universe itself vibrate.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“If you had a piece of neutron star about the size of a grape, it would weigh 100 million tonnes.”
― Brian Clegg, Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe

“is uncertain’ or that ‘anything goes’. In fact, it is a clear mathematical statement. It reflects the way that different aspects of the physical world are intimately connected at the quantum level. Its best-known formulation is that the more accurately you know the position of a quantum particle, the less accurately you know its momentum.†† It is impossible to know both perfectly at the same time.”
― Brian Clegg, Quantum Computing: The Transformative Technology of the Qubit Revolution

“like Max Tegmark (see here) suggest that the link between the math and reality will never be good enough—that the predictions will prove wrong if we ever get to analyze what appears to be a black hole up close.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“Transverse waves usually have to travel along the edge of the medium – for example, on the top of the water that the wave passes through. For a longitudinal wave, the regular cycle is in the same direction as the wave moves forward, not at right angles. The medium is repeatedly squashed up and relaxed like a concertina, so what travels through it is a pattern of compression and rarefaction.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“The work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others showed that light appeared to be both a wave and a stream of particles. Although it was convenient for many purposes to think of light as behaving like a wave, the particle idea explained more phenomena. As the great American physicist Richard Feynman would later put it: ‘It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told about light behaving like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave – like particles.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“Think of a Mexican wave travelling around a stadium (a Mexican wave is a transverse wave as the cycle of the motion is up and down, while the wave travels at right angles to that direction, round the stadium). The medium here is the mass of spectators who bob up and down. But they stay in their seat positions”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“Imagine simultaneously dropping two stones, a few centimetres apart, into a still pond. The ripples – waves – that the stones create will head outwards from the two locations that the stones hit the water until those waves meet. When they do, there will be points on the surface of the water where both waves are rippling in the same direction (up or down) at the same time. Here, the waves will reinforce each other, becoming stronger than before. At other points on the surface, the waves will be rippling in opposite (vertical) directions at any point in time. Here the waves will cancel each other out, leaving relatively still patches of water. This effect, producing a distinctive pattern on the surface, is known as interference.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“There is no biological concept of race.”
― Brian Clegg, What Do You Think You Are?: The Science of What Makes You You

“Descartes was responsible for analytical geometry, a mechanism for translating from geometrical forms to the equivalent algebraic equations and vice versa.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“you only have to go back a few tens of generations and everyone with surviving descendants is a common ancestor.”
― Brian Clegg, What Do You Think You Are?: The Science of What Makes You You

“the two disciplines are inherently different in this way. One (math) is a collection of facts, which we are able to establish because we fix the rules, and the other (science) is a collection of models and theories, which we can test against data, but can never call the actual truth.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“So, for instance, even though the Earth is travelling in a straight line through space, space itself is curved, so the planet orbits the bowling ball of the Sun. It is a simple, but astonishing observation. Planets move in straight lines. There really is no force pulling them into an orbit. It’s just that the space their straight line path runs through gets twisted.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“We tend to remember Descartes for two things—proclaiming “I think, therefore I am,” and having the so-called “Cartesian coordinates” named after him, where we specify locations on a chart with x and y values. But this was just a tiny part of his work, which took in everything from theories on light to attempts to take a scientific view on the soul.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“Newton made the calculations that would enable him to establish his laws of motion and gravity in a new, mysterious mathematics, the method of fluxions, that dealt with the infinitesimally small.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“Immensely simplified, quantum physics has two rules: Very small things don’t have locations, we just have probabilities of where they are. The first rule only works if these very small things don’t interact with their environment.”
― Brian Clegg, Quantum Computing: The Transformative Technology of the Qubit Revolution

“As noted previously, there are a number of other algorithms beyond search, prime factors and Monte Carlo methods, though many of these apply only to very specialist mathematical problems and may never have practical applications. As yet, though, the range available is relatively limited. Some of this may be due to the limitations that are imposed in dreaming up algorithms without an actual device to run them on, but it is entirely possible that the list will always be fairly short, as we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties of getting quantum algorithms that will run. However, Lov Grover commented in an interview with the author a while ago: ‘Not everyone agrees with this, but I believe that there are many more quantum algorithms to be discovered.’
Even if Grover is right, quantum computers are never going to supplant conventional computers as general-purpose machines. They are always likely to be specialist in application. And, as we shall see, it is not easy to get quantum computers to work at all, let alone develop them into robust desktop devices like a familiar PC.”
― Brian Clegg, Quantum Computing: The transformative technology of the Qubit Revolution

“Imagine we’re in a spaceship moving steadily through space and we throw a ball across the ship from side to side. It will move in a straight line, because both the ball and the ship are moving forwards at the same speed. But if the ship accelerates, the ball’s path will become curved, as the ship moves ahead more quickly. The straight line path has become curved from the viewpoint of the ship. Similarly, Einstein reasoned, a straight line path in space would be curved by gravity.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“You could say that a qubit is analog rather than digital”
― Brian Clegg, The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science's Strangest Phenomenon

“But from the Earth’s point of view, time on the ship is passing slowly, so that when t has elapsed on the ship, 4t has gone by on the Earth.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“stick with √2, or write out as many decimal places of the diagonal’s length as we require, such as 1.414213452 … but these were not options that were available to the whole-number obsessed Pythagoreans. We now call a number like this irrational because it can’t be made from the ratio of two whole numbers, but for the Pythagoreans it seemed to literally be an assault on the foundations of rationality.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“The remarkable Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell worked out in the early 1860s that light was an interaction between electricity and magnetism. And this meant that in principle, you could have an electric wave creating a magnetic wave, creating an electric wave and so on, hauling itself through empty space by its own bootstraps without any material medium required – it is the electromagnetic field that acts as the material.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe

“silica (also known as sand).”
― Brian Clegg, The Graphene Revolution: The weird science of the ultra-thin

“Astronomers have observed many objects in deep space that behave from indirect evidence as if they were black holes. The evidence is strong, but remains indirect. We have never observed a black hole.”
― Brian Clegg, Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World

“La teoría de cuerdas tiene un inconfundible regusto a la Grecia antigua, pues en lugar de ser deducida de las observaciones del universo que nos rodea, es una posibilidad surgida de la pura matemática y luego ajustada al mundo”
― Brian Clegg

“When you speak to someone, your vocal cords start a compression wave in the air that spreads out from your mouth until those compressions and rarefactions reach the listener’s ear. There, they vibrate the hair-like structures in the ear, producing the sensation of hearing. But the link between you and the listener is the longitudinal waves that pass through the air.”
― Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe