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 your own area?
Dave, as a writer, offers "Omit needless words." Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa responds 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.
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. You can decide the relative importance of those.
Anyway, it's a good question, and a decent answer occurred to me:
Taking my field to be quantum optics, more or less, I'd go with:
Light is both a particle and a wave.
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.
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!
What would your sentence be?
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My only quibble is semantic. I would say that light behaves as both a particle and a wave.
The solid ground you are standing on is moving across the globe at about the rate your fingernails grow.
The "Feynman sentence" as given above is incomplete. The full sentence contains much more information:
"...all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
The remarks regarding repulsion at short range and attraction at slightly longer range are crucial for what Feynman was trying to get at in that lecture.
The sentence about atoms I always felt troubled by - we had people talking atoms for thousands of years before Dalton for example. I always thought a sentence about the world should be something along the lines of:
The universe works by rules that don't depend on who you are, what you are doing, or what you believe.
Risa's long sentence may be mathematically expressed as R = ct and GM = tc^3, or in Planck units M/M_p = t/t_p.
My sentence, if it had to be short, would be: "Information has structure."
"Everything is made of smaller things and can behave as either a wave or a particle"?