Quotes About Quantum

Max Tegmark in his book Our Mathematical Universe.

He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger's pedestrian.

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.

What we call science is actually physical science. What we call spirituality is actually inner sciences or sciences not dealing with the physical world. The process of the union between science and spirituality is already in progress. This can be seen in the field of quantum physics merging with mysticism, in homeopathy, in acupuncture, feng shui, chi kung, vibrational medicine and others.

Randomness It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

What quantum reality is, is the reality marketplace. The house of a God that plays dice has many rooms. We can live in only one room at a time, but it is the whole house that is reality." He

Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless.

If the universe as we know it is nothing but a vacuum fluctuation with a purloined total energy that is not much different from zero, it may exist for quite a while before the vacuum decides to call in the loan.

Certain macroscopic objects directly display quantum mechanical effects. Superconductors and neutron stars-the latter behaving like atomic nuclei with a six-mile diameter-are macroscopic objects that cannot be described in terms of classical physics.

The oscillations-or waves-mandated by the Goldstone theorem originate in the application of symmetry operations to small domains.

The orthodox interpretation offers no explanation as to why everyday objects never assume quantum mechanical states that do not allow a classical interpretation.

In physics terms, the reason for symmetry breaking is the instability of the symmetric state.

Light is an excitation of empty space proper, of the vacuum. It is no more and no less.

All in all, we come to the conclusion that no more than 1 percent of all matter in the universe falls in the visible category.

Particle-antiparticle pairs fluctuating in the vacuum also permit the fusion of two real photons into a single one, in the presence of an external field.

The uncertainty relation tells us that an infinitely large energy corresponds to infinitely small distances.

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.

Which of the two possibilities corresponds to reality is simply unknown until a definite measurement is made, at which point the quantum state instantaneously changes to reflect the result of that measurement.

Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.

He saw that, ultimately, only possibilities for events and their probabilities of occurring, with intrinsic uncertainties, exist. This was the emerging new reality of quantum physics.

The Born interpretation of the Schrödinger equation is the single most dramatic and major change in our world view since Newton.

Quantum mechanics can be said to have three remarkable qualities: (1) it is counterintuitive; (2) it works; and (3) it has aspects that made it unacceptable to the likes of Einstein and Schrödinger and that have made it a source of continuing study in the 1990s.

The electrons seem eerily to take both paths at once if nothing is watching, but a definite path if someone or something is watching! These are not particles and not waves-they are both and neither-they are something new: They are quantum states.6

Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumvented, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.