Andre Geim Quotes

Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries - and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.

I want to study theoretical physics because it is one of the hardest things there is.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.

Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers.

Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence - and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.

But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

Though an atom is invisible, unthinkable, yet in it are the whole power and potency of the universe.

90% of the mass in your body comes from empty space.

I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

Subatomic particles do not just sit around being subatomic particles. They are beehives of activity.