Quotes from John Gribbin

In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

the best things in science are both beautiful and simple, a fact that all too many teacher conceal from their students, by accident or design.

true story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction.

Nothing is real unless it is observed

there is no underlying reality to the world. "Reality," in the everyday sense, is not a good way to think about the behavior of the fundamental particles that make up the universe; yet at the same time those particles seem to be inseparably connected into some invisible whole, each aware of what happens to the others.

It isn't just that Bohr's atom with its electron "orbits" is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".

From this", says Schrödinger, "I learned many things, but not religion." His favourite question was, "Sir, do you really believe that?

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Earth as our home in space, a single blue-white oasis of life surrounded by a black desert.

Every problem in quantum physics had to be first "solved" using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning.

If the business of physics is ever finished, the world will be a much less interesting place in which to live . . .

In 1906, J. J. Thomson had received the Nobel Prize for proving that electrons are particles; in 1937 he saw his son awarded the Nobel Prize for proving that electrons are waves. Both father and son were correct, and both awards were fully merited.

At one point, Einstein had commented: 'It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

As I understood it, what really mattered was simply that some systems ('system' is just a jargon word for anything, like a swinging pendulum, or the Solar System, or water dripping from a tap) are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial 'push' you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its own behaviour.

Reality' is the idea that there is a real world that exists whether or not anyone is looking at it, or measuring it.

The lack of solutions to the Three-Body Problem is not caused by our human deficiencies as mathematicians, it is build into the laws of mathematics.

These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton's laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second law of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future.

The image that emerges from quantum physics is similar in some ways to the way that the illusion that air, or water is a continuous fluid emerges. Myriad tiny particles separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth fluid. Myriad quantum states separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth flow of time. Zeno was right. The arrow of time points, but it does not move. THE

There is no absolute truth at the quantum level

in 1906, ill and depressed, unhappy about the continuing opposition of many leading scientists to this kinetic theory of gases, he killed himself

The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws.

Nuestro medio ambiente terrestre es, en gran parte, producto del Universo en el que vivimos.

The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside