Quotes About Quantum

Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. The

Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.

Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting microevents.

An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time—all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that "God does not play dice," Bohr responded by admonishing him, "Stop telling God what to do." Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.

A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr's quantum leaps, against Heisenberg's world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.

Quanta of space mingle with the foam of spacetime, and the structure of things is born from reciprocal information that weaves the correlations among the regions of the world.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

Heisenberg had understood that you can't locate a particle at a point in space for long: it soon escapes. The smaller the region where we try to locate a particle, the greater the velocity at which it escapes.

In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that "absolute simultaneity" does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist "now.

The world is strange, but simple

The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The

If LISA is launched, it should be able to see not only the gravitational waves produced by stars and black holes but also the diffuse background of primordial gravitational waves generated at a time close to the Big Bang. These waves should tell us about the quantum bounce. In the subtle irregularities of space, we should be able to find traces of events that took place fourteen billion years ago, at the origin of our universe, and confirm our deductions on the nature of space and time.

The granular discrete structure of space resolves the difficulties of the quantum theory of fields, eliminating the infinities by which it is afflicted.

Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: "I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.

The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54

Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.