Quotes from Philip Ball

Quantum theory had the strangest genesis," Ball says. "Its pioneers made it up as they went along. What else could they do?

officials gained their posts by demonstrating their knowledge of the Confucian classics; they had no reason to be versed in hydraulic engineering per se. In other words, there was a dangerously narrow view of what qualified a man for a government position (although in some ways the appointment of ministers in modern Western democracies is not so different).

Scientists, according to [Francis] Bacon, should not be like ants, busy doing mindless practical tasks, nor like spiders, weaving tenuous philosophical webs, but like bees, mining nature for her goodness and using it to make useful things.

regimes of the twentieth century depended not just on repression and control of the populace but on the active construction of national myth. Here the state leaders adopt the role of wise, courageous patriarchs who bravely resist decadent and predatory foreign influence, while the self-sacrifice expected of citizens is celebrated with heroic images and narratives. The state becomes the source of moral virtue.

Decoherence – entanglement with the environment – is the very process by which information passes from the quantum system to its environment. It's what makes this information accessible: what makes the pointer move. Thanks to einselection, the information gets filtered in the process so that only the pointer states survive.

W]hereas we might have been content enough to believe that electrons in a bright beam are wave-like and can be diffracted by the double slits, it is hard to understand how one-by-one passage of what seem to be particles (judging from the discrete bright spots that appear on the screen) can produce wave-like interference. We're forced to conclude that 'wave-like' electrons can interfere with themselves.

Creer que el genio conlleva estar libre de error es malinterpretar la naturaleza de la creatividad y el entendimiento.

Cabe decir que los genios tienen más posibilidades de incurrir en el error que la media.