Why Does E=mc²? Quotes

“In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Our experience teaches us that there are indeed laws of nature, regularities in the way things behave, and that these laws are best expressed using the language of mathematics. This raises the interesting possibility that mathematical consistency might be used to guide us, along with experimental observation, to the laws that describe physical reality, and this has proved to be the case time and again throughout the history of science. We will see this happen during the course of this book, and it is truly one of the wonderful mysteries of our universe that it should be so.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“If there is one thing we try to teach our students when they first arrive at the University of Manchester, ready to learn to be physicists, it is that everyone gets confused and stuck. Very few people understand difficult concepts the first time they encounter them, and the way to a deeper understanding is to move forward with small steps. In the words of Douglas Adams: 'Don’t panic!”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday’s diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Perhaps we should not be too surprised that nature sometimes appears counterintuitive to a tribe of observant, carbon-based ape descendants roaming around on the surface of a rocky world orbiting an unremarkable middle-aged star at the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy.”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“The current worldview is never claimed to be correct, in the very important sense that there are no absolute truths in science. The body of scientific knowledge at any point in history, including now, is simply the collection of theories and views of the world that have not yet been shown to be wrong.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Later, we shall see that if it were possible to exceed the speed of light, we could construct time machines capable of transporting us backward through history to any point in the past. We could imagine journeying back to a time before we were born and, by accident or design, preventing our parents from ever meeting. This makes for excellent science fiction, but it is no way to build a universe, and indeed Einstein found that the universe is not built like this. Space and time are delicately interwoven in a way that prevents such paradoxes from occurring.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“That dizzying feeling of confusion, if (hopefully) followed by an epiphany of clarity, is the joy of science. If the reader is feeling the former, we hope to deliver the latter by the end of the book.”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“Imagine that light is shining out from a flashlight. According to common sense, if we run fast enough we could in principle catch up with the front of the beam of light as it advances forward. Common sense might even suggest that we could jog alongside the front of the beam if we managed to run at the speed of light. But if we are to follow Maxwell’s equations to the letter, then no matter how fast we run, the beam still recedes away from us at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second.”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“Russell’s point is not to assert his right to be left alone to his personal delusions, but that devising a theory that cannot be proved or disproved by observation is pointless in the sense that it teaches you nothing, irrespective of how passionately you may believe in it. You can invent any object or idea you like, but if there is no way of observing it or its consequences, you haven’t made a contribution to the scientific understanding of the universe.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“It’s worth taking a brief pause here to ponder what has happened. Using only Pythagoras’ theorem and Einstein’s assumption about the speed of light being the same for everyone, we derived a mathematical formula that allowed us to predict the lengthening of the lifetime of a subatomic particle called a muon when that muon is accelerated around a particle accelerator in Brookhaven to 99.94 percent of the speed of light. Our prediction was that it should live 29 times longer than a muon standing still, and this prediction agrees exactly with what was seen by the scientists at Brookhaven. The more you think about this, the more wonderful it is. Welcome to the world of physics!”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“protons, electrons, and photons dominate the stuff of the everyday world. They simply have nothing to decay into: The up and down quarks are the lightest quarks, the electron is the lightest charged lepton, and the photon has no mass.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Negative stored energy” just means that it takes effort to dismantle the atom, and it often goes by the name “binding energy.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“After Einstein, everyone had to accept that they are different manifestations of the same type of thing. This is because we have discovered that energy, mass, and momentum must all be combined into a single spacetime object that we have been referring to as the spacetime momentum vector.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Our goal has been to find a new, four-dimensional momentum that will be conserved in spacetime. We”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Momentum was easy in that regard: An arrow points in the direction of motion and is of a length equal to the product of the mass and the speed.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“In other words, x and t can and will change but they must change in such a way that s never changes.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“and we fail in constructing a workable distance measure in spacetime, then we must go back to the drawing board.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“the speed of light is a constant of nature, as Maxwell seems to be trying to tell us, then it follows that time ticks at different rates depending on how we are moving relative to someone else.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Maxwell’s waves travel at 299,792,458 meters per second. Astonishingly, this is the speed of light—”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“Maxwell’s equations predict that the ratio of strengths gives the speed of the waves.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc²?

“There is a button on most calculators that computes the square root for you. It is usually denoted by the symbol “√” and one would normally write things like 3 = √9. As you can see, the square root is the opposite of squaring, 42 = 16 and √16 = 4.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc2?:

“it only ever makes sense to speak of motion relative to something else.”
― Brian Cox, Why Does E=mc2?: