Quotes About Quantum

In 1924, I became a Dozent in Gottingen and worked out the quantum mechanics during a holiday stay on Heligoland.

Own your joy so that you can be happier and bring more energy to the world. That ripple effect works on a quantum level. It brings about changes in the world.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Time is bunk.

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.

Quantum physics is quite interesting. All these tiny particles are there as much as they're not there. That to me is very, very interesting. And how our thoughts change the outcome of an experiment, I think that's all quite spiritual.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

The most important single thing about string theory is that it's a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That's big news.

Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.

When exactly does the "wave function collapse" take place? (So you're not kept in suspense, almost no modern physicist thinks that "consciousness" has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. There are an iconoclastic few who do, but it's a tiny minority, unrepresentative of the mainstream.)

Quantum Mechanics doesn't deserve the connotation of spookiness in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics is amazing; it is novel, profound, mind-stretching & a very different view of reality from what we're used to.

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures—including, but not limited to, living creatures—in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don't even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be?

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today.

A hundred quintillion googols!

Quantum reality is a wave function; classical positions and velocities are merely what we are able to observe when we probe that wave function.

Rµv - (1/2)Rgµv = 8?GTµv. This is the equation that a physicist would think of if you said "Einstein's equation"; that E = mc2 business is a minor thing,

Don't play Quantum Russian Roulette.

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand–born experimental physicist who was as responsible as anyone for discovering the structure of the atom, once remarked that "all of science is either physics or stamp collecting.

That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905: You publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second-most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal.

As a measurement apparatus interacts with a quantum system, the two become entangled with each other. There are no wave-function collapses or classical realms. The apparatus itself evolves into a superposition, entangled with the state of the thing being observed.

Upon measurement, the wave function collapses. However spread out it may have been pre-measurement, afterward it is concentrated on the result we obtained.

The idea that light is emitted in discrete quanta of energy related to its frequency is puzzling,

That's the uncertainty principle. It's not that we can't know both quantities at the same time; it's just a fact about how wave functions work that if position is concentrated near some location, momentum is completely undetermined, and vice versa.

In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.