Peter Higgs Quotes

If diffraction or interference phenomena were to be sought it was therefore necessary, in accordance with the basic principles of wave theory, to select for the test arrangement far smaller decisive dimensions than those employed in corresponding tests with visible light.

Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together.

The rotation of the polarization plane is extraordinarily small in all gases, thus also in sodium vapour.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

The bubbles are thinner than wavelengths of light.

You have to understand the nature of light.

This result is due to a phenomenon of interference which occurs within the sensitive layer.

Are not rays of light very small bodies emitted from shining substances?

A radio telescope pointing at the sky receives radiation not only from space, but also from other sources including the ground, the earth's atmosphere, and the components of the radio telescope itself.

I am interested in the physicality of light itself.

To some degree, to control light, I have to have a way to form it, so I use form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas.

There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.

For X-rays, the phenomenon of diffraction by crystals was a natural consequence of the idea that X-rays are waves analogous to light and differ from it only by having a smaller wavelength.

Elementary considerations led me to the conclusion that a medium, composed of layers of different dielectric constants, must behave as a uniaxial crystal if it is assumed that the layer thicknesses are only a fraction of a wave-length.

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

Phase contrast was not discovered while working with a microscope, but in a different part of optics.

During exposure, interference takes place between the incident rays and those reflected by the mirror, with the formation of interference fringes half a wavelength distant from each other.

Intensity like signal strength will generally fall off with distance from the source, although it also depends on the local conditions and the pathway from the source to the point.

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors.

I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.

If you know the shape of the lens and the image you get, you can work out the path that light followed between the object and your eye.

I had a much better view with the halo than I expected.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.