Gabriel Lippmann Quotes

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

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

The model I came up with in 1964 is just the invention of a rather strange sort of medium that looks the same in all directions and produces a kind of refraction that is a little bit more complicated than that of light in glass or water.

Sound is a movement which is handed on from atom to atom in a gas through which the sound is passing, just as a chain of workers pass buckets of water to a fire. The quicker the workers move their hands and arms, the quicker the water moves.

Everything goes in waves. Evolution goes in waves. The ocean goes in waves. Energy goes in waves. Sound travels in waves.

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

All things are in a state of vibration. Vibrations from objects in our surroundings are constantly impinging upon us and carry to our senses a cognition of the external world. The vibrations in the ether act upon our eyes so that we see, and vibrations in the air transmit sounds to the ear.

The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle.

Music is just air moving around.

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.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

I was very eager to produce an oscillator for short waves. I was doing science with microwaves, and I would get down to a few millimetres in wavelength, but I wanted to get shorter wavelengths; I wanted to get into the infra-red because I saw there was a lot more to be done there.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.

You have to understand the nature of light.

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.

I love the word 'resonance.'

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.

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.

Along a series of lines running from longer to shorter wavelengths the effect of the electric field becomes greater as the serial numbers increase - that is, as the wavelength decreases.

Radio is immediate.

For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency - their familiar characteristic spectra - and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.

Sounds always fascinated me.