Quotes About Quantum

Quantum jumping is the process by which a person envisions some desired result or state of being that is different from the existing situation—and by clearly observing that possibility and supplying sufficient energy, makes a leap into that alternate reality.

You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.

From a theoretical point of view, it is very hard to imagine how gravity could avoid being quantized.

But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy.

If I realize that actually there's quantum mechanics happening around us all the time in some macroscopic, interconnected way, then that doesn't change my perception of it, that doesn't change my interaction with it; it just changes how I view my interaction.

According to quantum mechanics, at the Planck scale length, instead of a gradually undulating geometry, there should be wild fluctuations and loops and handles of spacetime branching off, the sort of topography that the futuristic Ike encountered. General relativity cannot be used in such untamed territory.

calculations

When a field takes a nonzero value, the best way to think about it is to imagine space manifesting the charge that the field carries, but not containing any actual particles.

The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, coupled with the relations of special relativity, tell us that, using physical constants, we can relate a particle's mass, energy, and momentum to the minimum size of the region in which a particle of that energy can experience forces or interactions.

COBE discovered the quantum fluctuations that were generated when the Universe was roughly the size of a grain of sand, and which are ultimately the origin of you

Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

If an extra dimension is rolled up into a circle, the mass of the lightest such particle would differ from the electron's mass by an amount inversely proportional to the extra dimension's size. That means that, the larger the extra dimension, the smaller the particle's mass.

If large extra dimensions solve the hierarchy problem, higher-dimensional gravity would become strong at about a TeV.

The photon is the first example we will encounter of a gauge boson, a fundamental, elementary particle that is responsible for communicating a particular force.

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

It's hard to build large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers. I hope that we can cross that hurdle soon and build general-purpose quantum computers with hundreds or thousands of quantum bits. But the most important hurdle is in our own understanding. Unless we can understand how the world processes information at a quantum level, we will remain in the dark.

My colleagues and I recently showed that you can think of time travel, the process of going from the future into the past, as a kind of teleportation of information from now to back then. Moreover, we were actually able to use a simple quantum computer to demonstrate this effect. We could investigate what happens when you send a photon billionths of a second backwards in time.

Right now, we have small, general-purpose quantum computers that can basically do anything you ask them to, if you ask nicely. Then we have large, special-purpose quantum computers that can solve specific problems better than classical computers can. What we don't have is a large, general-purpose quantum computer of the sort that would be needed to break codes, strike fear in the heart of the National Security Agency and other three-letter agencies. Which is probably a good thing.

We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.

Yes, I am a quantum mechanic! Those darn quantum computers break all the time.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

Quantum mechanics is just completely strange and counterintuitive. We can't believe that things can be here [in one place] and there [in another place] at the same time. And yet that's a fundamental piece of quantum mechanics. So then the question is, life is dealing us weird lemons, can we make some weird lemonade from this?

It's recently been discovered that actual living systems such as photosynthetic bacteria in plants are using funky quantum weirdness techniques to make energy transport in plants and bacteria be much, much more efficient. It was kind of a drag because, you know, we discovered all these cool quantum techniques, and then we found out, whoa, these bacteria have been doing it for a billion years! Well, they didn't publish, so it's okay.

In science there is only physics all the rest is stamp collecting.