Quotes About Reality

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.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion." Illusion

Time is our ignorance.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.'104

Too often scientists sell hypothetical theories to the large public, as if they were established theories. I have seen this often done, for instance, with string theory. I think this is a great mistake, because it questions the credibility itself of science. We scientists live out of public money and it is our duty to be fully honest in reporting what we know and what we do not know. We are paid to dream, but we must not sell our dreams for established realities.

Our "present" does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.

But there are not just two times. Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.

The world is strange, but simple

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.

I want a theory of physics that accounts for the structure of the universe, that clarifies what it is to be an observer in the universe, not a theory that makes the universe depend on me observing it.

Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?

There is no "truer" time; there are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. But there are not just two times. Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.

The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.

What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn't stack up anymore.

Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

They are prompted by the experience of life itself. Fragile, brief, full of illusions.

The passing of time is intrinsic to the world; it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events that are the world, and that themselves generate their own time.

Ever since we discovered that the Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it.

In our everyday life we move at low speeds in relation to the speed of light and so we do not perceive the discrepancies between the different proper times of different clocks, and the differences in speed at which time passes at different distances from a mass are too small for us to distinguish. In the end, therefore, instead of many possible times, we can speak only of a single time: the time of our experience—uniform, universal, and ordered.

Uzay maddenin var olduÄŸu yerde eÄŸrilir.