{"id":981,"date":"2007-01-02T09:52:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-02T09:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/02\/one-sentence\/"},"modified":"2007-01-02T09:52:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-02T09:52:00","slug":"one-sentence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/02\/one-sentence\/","title":{"rendered":"One Sentence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time back, Dave Munger called me out<\/a> for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly:<\/p>\n

\n

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dave, as a writer, offers “Omit needless words.” Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa responds<\/a> with the much less elegant: “The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping ever since.” Commenters at those sites add plenty more suggestions.<\/p>\n

I didn’t answer at the time, for three reasons: I don’t usually do memes, I couldn’t immediately think of anything I liked better than “Everything is made of atoms,” and I got some distracting news<\/a>. You can decide the relative importance of those.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s a good question, and a decent answer occurred to me:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Taking my field to be quantum optics, more or less, I’d go with:<\/p>\n

\n

Light is both a particle and a wave.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m pretty happy with that. It’s short, contains a lot of information, and in the same sort of spirit as Feynman’s “Eveything is made of atoms,” the ideas behind that sentence would set you on the path to reconstructing most of modern physics.<\/p>\n

And, as a bonus, if the people after the physics apocalypse turn out to be dunderheads who can’t reconstruct modern physics, it’s got a nice sort of Zen quality to it. MU!<\/p>\n

What would your sentence be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some time back, Dave Munger called me out for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly: Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about… Continue reading One Sentence<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-quantum_optics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}