"A 'quantum gravity expert' is presumably someone well acquainted with the details of our immense ignorance of the subject. I suppose I count."
― John Carlos Baez (born 1961)
"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric."
― Huston Cummings Smith (born 1919),
Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography
"Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts."
― Werner Heisenberg (1901 to 1976)
"Because of the relativistic nature of subatomic particles, we cannot understand their properties without understanding their mutual reactions, and because of the basic interconnectedness of the subatomic world we shall not understand any one particle before understanding all the others."
― Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, [3rd Edition, p. 205]
"But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes."
― Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud (1896 to 1948)
"Enlightenment or awakening, in the Eastern traditions, is the individual's experience of reconnecting with this ultimate ground of being, the 'suchness' [तथागत (Devangari),Tathāgata/Tathā-āgata] that supersedes all dualism. As the Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha put it two thousand years ago: 'Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence'. Capra points out that such paradoxical descriptions sound identical to the physicist's attempts to grasp the slippery essence of quantum objects, which are neither wave nor particle, do not exist yet do not not exist."
― Daniel Pinchbeck (born 1966) 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
"Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton."
― Marshall McLuhan (1911 to 1980), Essential McLuhan
"Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it's own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"In a sense, the difference between classical and quantum mechanics can be seen to be due to the fact that classical mechanics took to superficial a view of the world: it dealt with appearances. However, quantum mechanics accepts that appearances are the manifestation of a deeper structure (the wavefunction, the amplitude of the state, not the state itself), and that all calculations must be carried out on this substructure."
― Peter William Atkins (born 1940), Quanta, Second Edition
"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."
― Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow (born 1942)
"Is it not good to know what follows from what, even if it is not necessary FAPP? [FAPP is Bell's disparaging abbreviation of "for all practical purposes."] Suppose for example that quantum mechanics were found to resist precise formulation. Suppose that when formulation beyond FAPP is attempted, we find an unmovable finger obstinately pointing outside the subject, to the mind of the observer, to the Hindu scriptures, to God, or even only Gravitation? Would that not be very, very interesting?"
― John Stewart Bell (1928 to 1990), quoted in Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset."
― Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944), The World of Mathematics edited by J. R. Newman
"It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
― 加來 道雄, Michio Kaku (born 1947)
"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
― Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)
"Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it."
― Pascual Jordan (1902 to 1980)
"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Something unknown is doing we don't know what."
― Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944), comment on the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, 1927
"Stop telling God what to do with his dice."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962) atomic physicist, directed to Albert Einstein's quote
"Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."
― Bernard d'Espagnat (born 1921)
"The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of"
― book title by Stephen Hawking, subtitled: The Most Astounding Papers of Quantum Physics - and How They Shook the Scientific World about Quantum Physics or Mechanics
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"The Quantum Unconscious: There is a Collective Entanglement of the frequencies of all life's energy. It is this String that ties the past to the future, one unconsciousness to anothers consciousness from one dimension to all the others, from here to the infinite. From a thought to a reality, From a Vibration to a Manifestation. From the beginning to the never ending."
― Simon Crowne
"The very nature of the quantum theory . . . forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical 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 . . . "
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Those who are not shocked when the first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Truth and clarity are complementary."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"Vivere est Cogitare" (To think is to live)
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962), quoting Marcus Tullius Cicero
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."
― Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 to 1944),
Space, Time, and Gravitation (1920)
"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words . . . Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character . . . We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."
― Niels Bohr (1885 to 1962)
"When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness."
― Eugene Paul Wigner, Wigner Jenö Pál (1902 to 1995)
"Whether electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular."
― Werner Heisenberg (1901 to 1976)
"While the founding fathers agonized over the question 'particle' or 'wave', de Broglie in 1925 proposed the obvious answer 'particle' and 'wave'. Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored."
― John Stewart Bell (1928 to 1990) in
Six Possible Worlds of Quantum Mechanics (1986),
included in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987)
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