Quotes About Quantum

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths11 of a second.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

According to the new theory, an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously in another without visiting the space between

the strange behavior of the electron. The principal problem they faced was that the electron sometimes behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave.

The uncertainty around which the theory is built is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant, but we cannot know both.

Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. This isn't a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is an immutable property of the universe.

the idea of action at a distance—that one particle could instantaneously influence another trillions of miles away—was a stark violation of the special theory of relativity. This expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light and yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could. (No one, incidentally, has ever explained how the particles achieve this feat.

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: "Bohr once commented that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said." Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: "Don't try.

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.

The ekpyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past with a pair of flat empty branes sitting parallel to each other in a warped five-dimensional space … The two branes, which form the walls of the fifth dimension, could have popped out of nothingness as a quantum fluctuation in the even more distant past and then drifted apart.

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?" – Father Foley

Quantum field theory must deal with [force] fields and [matter] fields on a fully equivalent footing...Here was my challenge.

En la carrera, extremadamente competitiva, por publicar nuevos descubrimientos, se escribieron más artículos sobre teoría cuántica en Gotinga que en Copenhague, Cavendish o cualquier sitio del mundo.

As the physicist Richard Feynman once observed, "[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.

was Born who in 1924 coined the term "quantum mechanics," and it was Born who suggested that the outcome of any interaction in the quantum world is determined by chance.

Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature.

absurd." Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn't exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets).

Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal

The quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater of space-time. Pull it and the whole thing unravels.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

Quantum field theory was originally developed for the treatment of electrodynamics, immediately after the completion of quantum mechanics and the discovery of the Dirac equation.

The publicity of the Nobel Prize has made clear that the research work connected with the Quantum Hall Effect was so successful because a tremendous large number of institutions and individuals supported this activity.