Quantum Quotes

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Possibly the best way to agitate a group of jaded but philosophically inclined physicists is to buy them a bottle of wine and mention interpretations of quantum mechanics. It is like opening a Pandora's box. I have been amused to discover that the number of viewpoints often exceeds the number of participants.

Just the way sound creates visible waves as it travels through a droplet of water, our "belief waves" ripple through the quantum fabric of the universe to become our bodies and the healing, abundance, and peace-or disease, lack, and suffering-that we experience in life. And just the way we can tune a sound to change its patterns, we can tune our beliefs to preserve or destroy all that we cherish, including life itself.

Welcome to the strange world of the quantum, where one cannot determine how a particle gets from here to there. Physicists are reduced to bookies, posting odds on the various possibilities.

Time appears in quantum mechanics as a continuous parameter which represents an abstraction of the dynamical role of the measurement apparatus.

Julian Schwinger

The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.

Terence McKenna

The discovery of quantum mechanics and of the principle of uncertainty has shown that man can tear himself away from deeply rooted notions, discover, and accept something that is beyond his power of visualing.

According to quantum doctrine, the roots of life and mind lie embedded deep down in the ultimate structure of this universe, and they are not mere singular apparitions of an unaccountable character, arising accidentally in the later phases of evolution.

That, in a nutshell, is the mystery of the quantum: When an electron is observed, it is a particle, but between observations its map of potentiality spreads out like a wave. Compared to the electron, even a platypus is banal.

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Don't look here for any "eastern mysticism", spoon bending or ESP. Do look here for the true story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction.... The question this book addresses is "What is reality?" The answer(s) may surprise you; you may not believe them.

Quantum science suggests the existence of many possible futures for each moment of our lives. Each future lies in a state of rest until it is awakened by choices made in the present.

Quantum mechanics taught that a particle was not a particle but a smudge, a traveling cloud of possibilities...

Quantum physics presents a new and exciting worldview that challenges old concepts, such as deterministic trajectories of motion and causal continuity. If initial conditions do not forever determine an object's motion, if instead, every time we observe, there is a new beginning, then the world is creative at the base level.

So the quantum, fiery creative force of modern physics, has burst forth in eruption after eruption and for all we know the next may be the greatest of all.

John Archibald Wheeler

There are certain situations in which the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can come out in a special way on a large scale.

If one intends to abandon Relativity, here is the place [black holes] to do so. Otherwise one is on the way to a new world of physics, both classical and quantum. Here we go!

Classical mechanics is a determinate theory. Knowledge of the state at a given time permits precise prediction of the result of measuring any property of the system. In contrast, quantum mechanics is only statistically determinate.

Julian Schwinger

And that was Big Bang. The Great Explosion. The universe subjected to relations of uncertainty, its radius of curvature undefined, its geometry imprecise with the uncertainty principle of Quantum Mechanics.

Ernesto Cardenal

Common sense drives us to accept quantum theory in place of classical physics as more consistent with common sense... When they are inspected, the explanations of classical physics fall apart, and they are seen to be mere superficial delusions, like film-sets.

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Quantum mechanics is probably essential to consciousness in about the same way as crystals were once essential to radios, or spark plugs are still essential to traffic jams. Necessary, but not sufficient.

William H. Calvin

I am convinced that the spectrum of all chemical elements can be obtained... from quantum theory in a unique manner without physics by boneheaded calculation.

Werner Heisenberg

We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery.

Richard Feynman

Nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.

John Archibald Wheeler

The quantum is the crack in the armor that covers the secret of existence.

John Archibald Wheeler

If atoms obey spooky rules, and we are made of atoms, why don't we follow the same rules? The answer to the quandary must lie on the theoretical ladder that leads from the laboratory down into the world of atoms, precisely at the missing rung between the two regimes, where classical physics loses its relevance and quantum mechanics takes over.

Hans Christian von Baeyer