Quotes from Philip Ball

The world is sensitive to our touch. It has a kind of 'Zing!' that makes it fly off in ways that are not imaginable classically. The whole structure of quantum mechanics may be nothing more than the optimal method of reasoning and processing information in the light of such a fundamental (wonderful) sensitivity. — Chris Fuchs

Hippocrates can be justifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.

The wavefunction tells us where we might potentially find an electron when we look; but what we do find in any given experiment is random, and we can't meaningfully say why we find it here rather than there.

The combination of random branching and orderly underlying lattice creates the exquisite complexity of the snowflake, poised on the brink of chaos and minutely sensitive to tiny variations in the temperature and humidity of the air.

Guan Zhong explains (as the fourth-century-BC Guanzi attests) that management of water is the key to maintaining social order. There are 'five harmful influences' in nature, he says, including drought and pestilence – but floods are the worst. Uncontrolled water has a symbolic as well as a pragmatic impact: it leads to the breakdown of filial piety and disintegration of social relations.

We know that measurements of a quantum system seem to collapse the wavefunction. We most certainly don't know how, or why, or indeed if that actually happens.

In quantum theory, words are blunt tools.

Q]uantum physics is not replaced by another sort of physics at large scales. It actually gives rise to classical physics. Our everyday, commonsense reality is, in this view, simply what quantum mechanics looks like when you're six feet tall.

A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.

Wavefunction collapse is a generator of knowledge: it is not so much a process that gives us the answers, but is the process by which answers are created. The outcome of that process can't, in general, be predicted with certainty, but quantum mechanics gives us a method for calculating the probabilities of particular outcomes. That's all we can ask for.

water is so protean a medium that it can be made to fit any purpose.

A ruler who failed to manage China's waters didn't just risk social decay. He exposed himself to the charge that heaven itself had lost confidence in his capacity to rule. This idea is attributed to the Duke of Zhou

T]he wavefunction of the electron in [a] box can penetrate into the walls. If the walls aren't too thick, the wavefunction can actually extend right through them, so that it still has a non-zero value on the outside. What this tells you is that there is a small chance – equal to the amplitude of the wavefunction squared in that part of space – that if you make a measurement of where the electron is, you might find it within the wall, or even outside the wall.

Much of the skill in doing science resides in knowing where in the hierarchy you are looking – and, as a consequence, what is relevant and what is not.

Quantum objects may in principle have a number of observable properties, but we can't gather them all (Copenhagenists might in fact say 'elicit them') in a single go, because they can't all exist at once. And by gathering some we may scramble the values of others.

T]he probabilistic nature of the Schrödinger equation, which predicts only the likelihood of different experimental outcomes, leaves it offering no reason why one specific outcome is observed instead of another. In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason.

The sustaining interest and enthusiasm of many friends and colleagues are, of course, the nutrition that every writer needs, and can never adequately acknowledge.

A]tomic nuclei are pretty hard to peer into. But that's not the root of the problem. It's that we simply can't, for quantum processes, talk about a historical progression of events that led to a given outcome. There's no story of how it 'got' to be that way.

Here is the answer to Einstein's question about the moon. Yes, it is there when no one observes it – because the environment is already, and without cease, 'measuring' it. All of the photons of sunlight that bounce off the moon are agents of decoherence, and more than adequate to fix its position in space and give it a sharp outline. The universe is always looking.

As Hans Bernd Gisevius, a civil servant under Hitler and a member of the German Resistance, puts it: One of the vital lessons that we must learn from the German disaster is the ease with which a people can be sucked down into the morass of inaction; let them as individuals fall prey to overcleverness, opportunism, or cowardliness and they are irrevocably lost.

The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already.

There is a] growing conviction that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not of tiny particles and waves but of information and its causative influence. It's a theory of how much we can deduce about the world by looking at it, and how that depends on intimate, invisible connections between here and there.

In a world threatened by pain and death, stories of miracle workers are a psychological necessity, because the alternative is unmitigated horror and despair.

We watch Paracelsus in Basle as though seeing a man run headlong toward a precipice. Like an indestructible lunatic, he will do so again and again throughout his life.