“In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.”

— Lee Smolin

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

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Lee Smolin 52

American cosmologist 1955

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“In every previous application of the quantum law, Planck's law, that the energy is h [Planck's constant] times the frequency, had been used to deduce the energy of a quantum when the frequency of the radiation was already known. In the present case the formula was used the other way; the energy of the emitted photon was known to begin with, and the formula was utilized to deduce its frequency. The frequencies calculated in this way are found to agree completely and exactly with those of the spectrum of hydrogen.”

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“There is a smallest unit of space. Its minimum value is given by the cube of the Planck length… If you take a volume of space and measure it to a very fine precision… It has to fall into some discrete series of numbers, just like the energy of an electron in an atom. …we can calculate the discrete areas and volumes from the theory.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“We have emphasized that there is a big conflict between quantum theory and general relativity, since it leads to ultraviolet difficulties. However, it does not mean that both frameworks are fundamentally contradictory to each other. In fact, at large distances, the situation is quite contrary. For an example, an old story in the famous debates between Einstein and Bohr shows that the quantum mechanical uncertainty relation ∆E ∆t ≥ h is consistent with the equivalence principle when ... applied to the measurement of weights in weak gravitational fields. Their mutual contradiction is manifested only at sufficiently short distances near the Planck length, where the quantum gravitational effects become of the same order as other nongravitational effects.”

Tamiaki Yoneya (1947) Japanese string theorist

"String Theory: Where are we now? https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0004075 arXiv preprint hep-th/0004075 (2000). (quote from pp. 9–10)

“You've read about action at a distance, or quantum theory. I've always had the feeling that when I go to a meat plant I must be very careful, because God's watching. Quantum theory will get me.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Page 282 of An Anthropologist On Mars By Oliver Sacks

“If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. …in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg …The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

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“In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"The Big Higgs Question" http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/07/09/big-higgs-question/, The New York Review of Books, 9 July 2012

“In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory…”

Erwin Schrödinger book What Is Life?

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“Planck’s quantization assumption applied to the matter that emits and absorbs radiation, not to radiation itself. As George Gamow later remarked, Planck thought that radiation was like butter; butter itself comes in any quantity, but it can be bought and sold only in multiples of one quarter pound. It was Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who in 1905 proposed that the energy of radiation of frequency ν was itself an integer multiple of hν.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 1: Historical Introduction

“I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

(1691) quoted in Popular Astronomy, Vol. 56 (1948), pp. 189–190.

“Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

address " What is Science? http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320

“In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.”

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Lee Smolin 52

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