We Have No Idea Quotes

“Mass is the property of objects that makes them resist changes in velocity. Simply”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“A single gram of antiparticles combined with a gram of normal particles would release more than 40 kilotonnes of explosive force, which is more than twice as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped by the United States in WWII. A normal household raisin weighs about a gram, so a raisin plus anti-raisin combination would be a dehydrated weapon of mass fruitation.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“Yes, those ten-billion-dollar twenty-seven-kilometer-long machines are good for more than just finding bosons named after Peter Higgs.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“this is mathematical speculation by a bunch of overcaffeinated theorists.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“Antiwater would look and feel and behave the same way as regular water except that if you drank it you would explode in a blinding flash of light, which, we admit, would be antirefreshing.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“biologists have been arguing for decades about the definition of “life” (the zombie-rights activists are a powerful lobby group),”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“At some point, Larry the cat will be going so fast that he actually sees the photon hit the target before it leaves the flashlight!”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“And if you have your doubts, there is a real website that you can check to see if the world has been destroyed”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“the entire universe contained in a single point, a singularity, where the mass is enormous, the volume zero, the density infinite, and the parking impossible.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“if there were once more stars visible to us than there are today, what once-obvious facts are we missing because humans arrived nearly fourteen billion years after the party started?”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“Today’s philosophy questions are tomorrow’s precision science experiments.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“The history of science is one of revolutions in which we discover each time that our view of the world was distorted by our particular perspective. A flat Earth, an Earth-centered solar system, a universe dominated by stars and planets—these were all reasonable ideas given the data at the time, but we now see them as embarrassingly naïve. Almost certainly, there are more such revolutions around the corner, in which important ideas we accept now, such as relativity and quantum physics, might be shattered and replaced with mind-blowing new ones.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“Ever since William of Ockham,119 scientists and philosophers have preferred simpler, more compact explanations over longer, more complex ones. For example, suppose you came home one day and your pool smelled like baboons. Would it make more sense to assume that an international crime organization put drops of baboon perfume in your pool as part of a complicated heist involving Justin Bieber and three professional basketball players, or would it make more sense to simply assume your pet baboon disobeyed your order and jumped in the pool to cool off?”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“if you are on a rocket moving close to the speed of light relative to Earth, then your speed through space is very high. So in order for your total speed through space-time relative to Earth to stay within the speed limit of the universe, your speed through time has to decrease—as measured by clocks on Earth.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“this is more in the category of late-night herb-inspired speculation than actual scientific prediction.”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

“Theorists are a smart bunch (in theory),”
― Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe