Brownian Motion Quotes

These motions were such as to satisfy me, after frequently repeated observation, that they arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.
[Summary of Brownian motion.] ~ Robert Brown

9 Something else you need to realize about the book
9.1. Is that
The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book's pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.
9.2 If you ever lose your place in the book
it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime. ~ Charles Yu

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead. ~ Neil Gaiman

The couple's love, long the unrivalled source of high-society conversation, collective rumor, and feminine envy, was transformed into an insignificant particle, caught up, along with millions of other particles, in chaotic motion. It was not a case of Brownian motion. It was a case of war. ~ Filip Florian

Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are ... well ... human beings. ~ Terry Pratchett

Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity. ~ James Hollis

I cannot explain how it begins, or why it happens, what strange alchemy puts such things in motion. ~ Megan Chance

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion. ~ Johannes Stark

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature's coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity's claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being. ~ Camille Paglia

I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it. ~ Sidney Poitier

What is it that keeps us in motion?
Not seldom, the fear that the bitterness of the past will catch up with us. The bitterness over all missed opportunities. Bitterness at being who you are, and still not more like yourself. ~ Lars Gustafsson

The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer ... and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it. ~ Irving Thalberg

After Evie had finished her plate, Sebastian tugged her to the billiards table and handed her a cue stick with a leather tip. Ignoring her attempts to refuse him, he proceeded to instruct her in the basics of the game. "Don't try to claim this is too scandalous for you," he told her with mock severity. "After running off with me to Gretna Green, nothing is beyond you. Certainly not one little billiards game. Bend over the table."
She complied awkwardly, flushing as she felt him lean over her, his body forming an exciting masculine cage as his hands arranged hers on the cue stick. "Now," she heard him say, "curl your index finger around the tip of the shaft. That's right. Don't grip so tightly, sweet…let your hand relax. Perfect." His head was close to hers, the light scent of sandalwood cologne rising from his warm skin. "Try to imagine a path between the cue ball - that's the white one - and the colored ball. You'll want to strike right about there" - he pointed to a place just above center on the cue ball - "to send the object ball into the side pocket. It's a straight-on shot, you see? Lower your head a bit. Draw the cue stick back and try to strike in a smooth motion."
Attempting the shot, Evie felt the tip of the cue stick fail to make proper contact with the white ball, sending it spinning clumsily off to the side of the table.
"A miscue," Sebastian remarked, deftly catching the cue ball in his hand and repositioning it. "Whenever that happens, reach f ~ Lisa Kleypas

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. ~ Ken Liu

Strangely, in slow motion replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air for even longer. ~ David Acfield

Three invalids. - Sufferings of George and Harris. - A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies. - Useful prescriptions. - Cure for liver complaint in children. - We agree that we are overworked, and need rest. - A week on the rolling deep? - George suggests the River. - Montmorency lodges an objection. - Original motion carried by majority of three to one. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion. ~ Anne Lamott

Beckett moved quickly. In one motion he snagged the pen out of Kim's scrub pocket, stepped back, and stabbed his forearm. The ballpoint produced an instant stream of blood.
"Here, take mine," he begged. "I've got plenty of blood. ~ Debra Anastasia

It was then that I sprang my surprise. Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There is nothing more powerful, more radical, more transformational than love. No other substance or force. And do not be deceived, for it is all of these things, and then far more than that. It can't be circumscribed by our desires or dictated by the whim of our moods. Not the Great Love of the Universe, as I like to call it. Not the Love that set everything in motion, keeps it in motion, which moves through all things and yet bulldozes nothing, not even our will. Try it. Just try it and you'll see. If you love that Great Love first, because It loved you first, and then love yourself as you have been loved, and love others from that love ... WOW! BAM! Life without that kind of faith-that's death. Therein lies the great metaphor ... Life without faith IS death. For life, as it was intended to be, is love. Start loving and you'll really start living. There is no other force in the universe comparable to that. ~ Carolyn Weber

In the midst of a universe that cannot exist for a second without constant motion, God transcended the order of nature. He stopped. He rested. And He prescribes the same for you and me. ~ Priscilla Shirer

Basic dance
and I should qualify the word basic
is primarily concerned with motion. So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion. That is so
but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion. In basic dance the motion is its own end
that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself. ~ Alwin Nikolais

It's odd the way that things tend to stop looking like themselves when you take their motion away. ~ Ainslie Hogarth

You don't want to be like the motion picture exec who had so many people at his funeral, but they were there just make sure he was dead. Or how about the guy who, at his funeral, the priest said, "Won't anyone stand up and say anything nice for the deceased?" and finally someone said, "Well, his brother was worse." ~ Charlie Munger

Unpredictable action is movement's equivalent to a page-turner in literature. On stage, we have certain options to make our moves appear surprising or even shocking. One choice is to remove transitions. We try to construct motion hunks, hunks of action that could be missed if an audience member blinks. ~ Elizabeth Streb

Motion is created by the destruction of balance. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Unresolved issues can escalate quickly, jeopardizing the workplace equilibrium, setting into motion a hostile and volatile workplace environment. ~ Asa Don Brown

Grace can never properly be said to exist without beauty; for it is only in the elegant proportions of beautiful forms that can be found that harmonious variety of line and motion which is the essence and charm of grace. ~ Johann Joachim Winckelmann

In swimming at my level it's about control of the small movements. A good ballet dancer floats across the stage, the best sprinters virtually abolish gravity. All motion occurs in the right direction. ~ Alexander Dale Oen

It really showed that you can do a major motion picture, from the folks at Marvel, that has multiple characters on an epic scale. On top of that, it also showed us that one of the most important elements is a certain kind of levity. ~ Jeph Loeb

Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape, to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation
the realization of an idea by an act of the will. ~ John Sterling

If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy become. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Ladies have come up with all these expressions to reassure men. "Oh, honey, it's not the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean." That may be true, but it takes a long time to get to England in a rowboat. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the man sleeping. ~ Samuel Beckett

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. ~ Isaac Newton

By some accounts, humans are dwarfed and shown to be trivial on the cosmic scale. By some accounts, humans are reduced and shown to be nothing but electronic molecules in motion on the atomic scale. But by equally impressive accounts, humans live at the center of complexity. ~ Paul Davies

Your pain brand new no matter how long it lasts which now means years ... ~ Andrew Motion

If our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. ~ Edward O. Wilson

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.
But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US! ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky