Quotes About Quantum

The idea that "there's something we don't know," given a certain wave function, is an outdated relic of our intuitive insistence that what we observe is what really exists. Quantum mechanics teaches us otherwise.

it should; it's part and parcel of the machinery of quantum mechanics, and a number of clever experiments have demonstrated its validity in the real world.

The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a simple motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

The new feature of quantum mechanics is the duplication of that pattern when the wave function branches. That's no reason to panic. We just have to adjust our notion of personal identity through time to account for a situation that we never had reason to contemplate over the millennia of pre-scientific human evolution.

As far as quantum field theory is concerned, a human being or the center of a star isn't all that different from empty space.

If there were some nefarious conspiracy to make the world look quantum-mechanical, it had to have been set up hundreds of years ago, when the light left those stars. It's possible, but doesn't seem likely.

treat measurements as fundamental, wave functions collapse when they are observed, don't ask questions about what's going on behind the scenes

Information is physical.

Any possible vibration of a quantum field can be thought of as a combination of vibrations with different specific wavelengths—just as any particular sound can be decomposed into a combination of various notes with specific frequencies.

Utterly wrong, according to the AQM way of thinking. It comes from a stubborn insistence on thinking of an electron as a tiny classical dot zipping around inside of the wave function, rather than the electron actually being the wave function.

On the other hand, in the memorable words of Richard Feynman, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics, no matter how many individual pieces make up the system you are thinking about, there is only one wave function . Even if we consider the entire universe and everything inside it, there is still only one wave function, sometimes redundantly known as the "wave function of the universe.

But honest physicists admit that we don't truly understand quantum mechanics.

According to quantum mechanics, what we can observe about the world is only a tiny subset of what actually exists.

To a physicist, a "vacuum" is not a machine that cleans your floors, nor does it even necessarily mean "empty space." It's simply "the lowest-energy state of a theory.

Neutrino masses aren't completely understood as yet, so let's pretend that they don't interact with the Higgs, although the jury is still out.)

As impressive as matrix mechanics was, it suffered from a severe marketing flaw. The mathematical formalism was highly abstract and difficult to understand. Einstein's reaction to the theory was typical: A veritable sorcerer's calculation. This is sufficiently ingenious and protected by its great complexity to be immune to any proof of its falsity. This from the guy who had proposed describing space-time in terms of non-Euclidian geometry.

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. "Do you know how fast you were going?" asks the cop. "No," Heisenberg replies. "But I know exactly where I am." I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are.

The right answer, whatever it may turn out to be, will more likely be phrased in terms of wave functions, Schrödinger's equation, and Hilbert spaces.

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a "national resource," and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories.

Reality is a wave function traveling both backward and forward in time.

If time were perfectly symmetric, gravity wouldn't exist.