Douglas Phillips > Quotes

“Even a contrary view, when argued from a platform of civility, becomes not an ideological threat to vanquish, but an alternative to consider and an opportunity to grasp the diversity of humanity.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Time

“When the world goes crazy, a friend can be the difference between a crushing defeat and I might just make it.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“The physical universe was always faithful. Run the right test and it responded with reality every time. But people were different. They could choose to disguise reality.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Space

“It was a place where high-speed protons crashed into each other, resulting in chaotic explosions of matter that revealed the very nature of the universe. If there was a cathedral for fundamental science, this was it.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Incident

“This structure commonly produces what is referred to as the argument from authority, an arrogance unequivocally dismissed by scientists elsewhere in the world.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Space

“It’s called the Hubble constant (H) and WMAP provided the most accurate measure anyone has ever had. Along with Newton’s gravitational constant (G), physicists derived this very simple equation for critical density, ρc. Critical density is the balance between H and G, between the expansive force and the gravitational force (which derives from mass). Critical density is the bullseye on a target, a what-if calculation of the relationship between these two opposing forces.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“the weakest link in the chain is the person at the very top; the president, premier, prime minister, chairman or dictator. We’ve seen belligerent, angry and impulsive people occupy these top spots in every country that maintains a nuclear arsenal. They make me nervous.”
― Douglas Phillips, The Quantum Series #1-3

“Someone had attached a bar tap handle on the people side of the glass with a small sign that read “Ice Cold” and provided a drawing of the atomic elements, beryllium, and erbium, abbreviated Be and Er. The beer tap was more than a gag. It had become a makeshift talisman – especially for the neuroscientists.”
― Douglas Phillips, Phenomena

“Two new friends, three if you counted an alien jellyfish living more than three hundred light-years away. It was both surprising and comforting to find out that people cared. When the world goes crazy, a friend can be the difference between a crushing defeat and I might just make it.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“the whole point of science was to expose reality.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“The blue sky was a product of Rayleigh scattering. The cold temperature was, of course, a natural consequence of a steep adiabatic lapse rate.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Incident

“She did have a code of ethics, even if it was entirely guilt-based.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Incident

“I suppose you could even position a remote-controlled scalpel in 4-D space and operate on a patient without ever cutting their skin. Tumor? No problem, just remove it from the inside-out.”
― Douglas Phillips, The Quantum Series #1-3

“A lie begun at the top and perpetuated by underlings who accepted it as truth was the hardest to detect.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Time

“The universe doesn’t care whether it makes sense to you.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“A new take on an old con. A method to produce a perfect fake. They record hours of video—a person speaking, for example—and then break the digital results down into small clips of a few pixels each, called shards. They can reassemble the shards into a new video that looks just as real as the original but is complete fantasy”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Time

“Critical density is a number with deep meaning. It tells you the precise amount of mass that is needed to exactly cancel expansion. It’s what makes our universe flat.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“As life clicks by, the missed opportunities and the unspoken words are things that stick with you, often painfully.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“Most quantum physicists now agree that uncertainty is a natural part of our universe.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Time

“Sometimes the concept of sleep itself kept her from sleeping. It was such an odd requirement for life. The body was satisfied with rest, food, and water, but the brain required an altered state of consciousness to continue functioning.”
― Douglas Phillips, Phenomena

“hanbok.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Space

“But another answer is that radio, or anything based on electromagnetism, is a technology that simply doesn’t fit the requirements. Nobody is broadcasting because at interstellar distances, radio is far too slow,”
― Douglas Phillips, The Quantum Series #1-3

“Exactly how this springing-thing happened is not yet clear, but scientists have confirmed just in the past ten years that nothingness was the original state.”
― Douglas Phillips, The Quantum Series #1-3

“Consciousness is larger than life, it’s a pattern that repeats and evolves. It might even be integrated into the universe in some special way.”
― Douglas Phillips, Phenomena

“words related to science. There was a time when a fact had been an accepted truth. Not anymore. For some, the word fact had become synonymous with a claim or assertion. Any person offering an argument could simply stack up their own set of alternative facts and, in their mind, be entirely justified. It often left Daniel wondering if there was any hope for the evolution of the species.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“I’ll appreciate the elegance I see in the world as a natural consequence of being alive. Humans appreciate the beauty of the universe because we are part of it.”
― Douglas Phillips, The Quantum Series #1-3

“timelike curve is a path through spacetime that never strays beyond the cone of space accessible at the speed of light. In other words, it’s a path that a spacecraft could follow (an ordinary, non-Star-Trek-warp-drive kind of spacecraft). When influenced by an intense gravitational field, the light cone tips toward warped space (a.k.a., gravity). Enough tipping and the timelike curve twists back on itself, eventually into a complete circle. It’s what astrophysicists call a closed timelike curve, or CTC.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Time

“In a Level I multiverse, we live in a sea of never-ending infinite space. Within that space, we can see only a “small” sphere with a diameter of 13.8 billion light-years (that’s how long it’s been since the Big Bang, thus we have no ability to see objects that might be farther away). But this visible sphere is merely a pocket universe—a bubble within the never-ending sea. The bubble came into existence from a Big Bang and a period of inflation (the few microseconds after the Big Bang during which space inflated faster than the speed of light). If this model represents the true nature of our universe, there could be many other pocket universes out there, far beyond our limited view, each of them also a result of local inflation within the infinite sea. A Level II multiverse is much the same except that each pocket universe has different versions of the fundamental forces, different elementary particles, etc. For example, the force of gravity might be stronger in one pocket universe than another. A Level III multiverse is derived from quantum superposition, and I’ll talk about that in the next section. A Level IV multiverse is purely mathematical, and I’ll leave that one to the deep-thinking mathematicians like Tegmark. Each multiverse concept has one thing in common: every universe was created from nothing, springing from a fluctuation in a quantum field that caused a single point of nothingness to blossom.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void

“But every good theory needs more than data, it needs a logical story to explain the measurements.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Entangled

“Marie’s action might have been impulsive, but if a man had done the same, he’d probably be deemed heroic. Certainly not irrational.”
― Douglas Phillips, Quantum Void