Quotes About Quantum

I believe that we can 'sense' the future. We just haven't yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

Having rejected any transcendent source, Nietzsche comes to hold that the principle of this becoming and struggle must lie in material things themselves, things considered as "dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta.

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

particle in a superposition between location X and location Y is in a strange state of being both at X and at Y while being definitely at neither.

quantum entanglement," technically defined as a situation in which the quantum state of one particle cannot be described independently of the quantum state of another.

I am in short, a witch of the quantumverse.

Modern developments in both logic and physics (quantum physics) have cast doubt on the universality of at least two of these so-called laws, giving support to the Port Royals' contention that logic is merely the refinement of clear thinking in aid of argumentation, or rhetoric.

At the quantum level, everything is interconnected energy, even matter.

I believe that the quantum of our knowledge will increase considerably in the coming years and that scientists will continue to be amongst the brave voices speaking out.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

All the particles that we are made of only account for about four per cent of the cosmic inventory.

What constitutes - where are we when we sleep? What is our sense of reality at that moment? It's, you know, science now suggests to us that what has been perceived as matter for a long time is, in fact, energy.