Quotes About Quantum

The first variation is called the delayed-choice experiment and was suggested in 1980 by the eminent physicist John Wheeler. The experiment brushes up against an eerily odd-sounding question: Does the past depend on the future?

Somehow, though, the photons always get it right. Whenever the detector is on—again, even if the choice to turn it on is delayed until long after a given photon has passed through the beam splitter—the photon acts fully like a particle.

it's as though the photons have a "premonition" of the experimental situation they will encounter farther downstream, and act accordingly. It's as if a consistent and definite history becomes manifest only after the future to which it leads has been fully settled.4

As we have seen, in quantum mechanics the norm is an indeterminate, fuzzy, hybrid reality consisting of many strands, which only crystallizes into a more familiar, definite reality when a suitable observation is carried out.

The world of the everyday suddenly seemed nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature's sleights of hand.

A calculation—not an assumption, not a hypothesis, not an inspired guess—determines the number of space dimensions according to string theory, and the surprising thing is that the calculated number is not three, but nine. String theory leads us, inevitably, to a universe with six extra space dimensions

The very existence of galaxies, stars, planets, and life itself derives from microscopic quantum uncertainty amplified by inflationary expansion.

Witten's result showed that much as the Wizard of Oz's frightening visage was produced by an ordinary man, a rapacious black hole is the holographic projection of something equally ordinary: a bath of hot particles in the boundary theory (Figure 9.6). Like a real hologram and the image it generates, the two theories-a black hole in the interior and a hot quantum field theory on the boundary-bear no apparent resemblance to each other, and yet they embody identical information.

the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

a) The probability wave for a macroscopic object is generally narrowly peaked. (b) The probability wave for a microscopic object, say, a single particle, is typically widely spread.

The implications of these features of quantum mechanics for our picture of reality are a subject of ongoing research. Many scientists, myself included, view them as part of a radical quantum updating of the meaning and properties of space.

the right slit—and since

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

What're quantum mechanics? I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.

Y'know,' he said, 'it's very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.

Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed (because of Quantum), it's even more true that it changes the observer.

The electron is first of all your concept of the electron.

The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities...and that they interact by quantum physics.